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In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham invented a "rhetorical question mark" (⸮) for use at the end of a rhetorical question; however, it fell out of use in the 17th century. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it. [7]
Bracketed question marks can be used for rhetorical questions, for example Oh, really(?), in informal contexts such as closed captioning. The question mark can also be used as a meta-sign to signal uncertainty regarding what precedes it. It is usually put between brackets: (?).
A question mark made of smaller question marks. A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide ...
Rhetorical question: asking a question as a way of asserting something. Asking a question that already has the answer hidden in it, or asking a question not to get an answer, but to assert something (or to create a poetic effect). Satire: humoristic criticism of society. Sesquipedalianism: use of long and obscure words.
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended to serve as a quick reference rather than an in-depth discussion. For more information, click the terms.
Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap. The oldest is the percontation point in the form of a reversed question mark (⸮), proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s for marking rhetorical questions, which can be a form of ...
Early attempts to create tone indicators stemmed from the difficulty of denoting irony in print media, and so several irony punctuation marks were proposed. The percontation point (⸮; a reversed question mark) was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s to denote a rhetorical question, but usage died out by the 1700s. [1]
Question marks are also used in declarative questions, as in the example given above (in this case they are equivalent to the intonation used in speech, being the only indication that the sentence is meant as a question). Question marks are sometimes omitted in rhetorical questions (the sentence given in the previous paragraph, when used in a ...