Rhetorical questions and epistemic stance in an Italian Facebook corpus during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study aims to investigate rhetorical questions (RQs) from the perspective of epistemic stance. The quantitative and qualitative analysis was conducted on a corpus consisting of a set of comments extracted from the Facebook page of a major Italian newspaper (Il Corriere della Sera) regarding the news of the suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March 2021. The theoretical framework for analysing the comments containing RQs was the KUB (Knowing, Unknowing, Believing) epistemic model. The main objectives of the study were (1) to analyse the linguistic and epistemic structure of the 75 RQs present in the corpus; (2) to identify the epistemic stance of the questioner, focussing on the implicit assertion of the RQs and demonstrating how it can be not only strong (i.e. from a Knowing/Certain position), as commonly claimed in the literature, but also mitigated (i.e. from a Believing/Uncertain position), without losing its rhetorical value. Besides addressing these research questions, the study identified three specific types of RQs in addition to the common type (the most studied in the literature): adynatic (or RQs of impossibility), deontic (or RQs of duty/ obligation), and epistemic (or RQs of belief).