Questions are used for multiple discourse purposes, beyond just seeking for information-bearing answers (Sadock (1971), Sadock (1974), Han (2002), Koshik (2005) to name but a few). Questions of a specific kind that are associated with a specific discourse pattern (Ariel, 2008) might serve as a fertile ground for rhetoric interpretations via contextual deduction (questions cannot serve as a discourse pattern on their own right) and later might even undergo various grammaticalization processes (e.g. Herring 1991 for rhetorical questions in Tamil, Koshik 2005 for rhetorical questions in English). Like any other linguistic phrase that is consistently associated with a certain discourse pattern, questions might gradually lose their original function (in this case: questioning) and turn into linguistic constructions that bear an altogether different meaning than the compositional meaning of their parts. This type of grammaticalization process is the focus of this paper. It is a two-stage process whereby questions lose their original questioning function. Initially, they are recruited to convey the strong and emotional speaker's stance (usually his/her resentment) towards a salient discourse assumption or claim. Then, this interpretation becomes a salient discourse profile of the specific questions, it fixates so that these questions become Goldbergian constructions (Goldberg, 1995), titled Constructional Rhetorical Questions (CRQ, Bardenstein 2018). These constructions pair a certain form with a certain meaning uncompositionally (their meaning is not composed of the meanings of their parts). In other words, the relevant questions: (a) are never interpreted as 'real' (information-seeking) questions and (b) there is no way of predicting their meanings based on the meaning of their parts or based on other related constructions. Thus, we witness a linguistic historical-change process of question forms whose linguistic recruitment and pragmatic usage eventually becomes semantic (to the point where the question is not even perceived as a question any longer). In this paper I focus on four types of CRQs in Hebrew, based on several corpora.
