4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2009
⏱️ 4 minutes
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0:00.0 | Grammar Drill here, today guest writer Bonu Trango will help us talk about two kinds of |
0:09.6 | peculiar questions. |
0:11.0 | Isn't that going to be fun? |
0:12.8 | Isn't that going to be fun? |
0:14.8 | Is a rhetorical question. |
0:16.2 | We're also going to learn about its cousin. |
0:18.6 | That's called a tag question, isn't it? |
0:21.1 | That last sentence was an example of a tag question. |
0:24.9 | All these question questions started because of a question from one of my Twitter followers. |
0:29.6 | Aaron wants to know if the sentence isn't it funny, is correct. |
0:33.6 | And he'd like to know if he's allowed to use such a construction in formal situations. |
0:38.1 | You've probably heard rhetorical questions more often than you realize. |
0:41.9 | You start a sentence with a negative word when you mean something positive. |
0:46.0 | So wasn't that a great movie? |
0:48.4 | Means that you think the movie was great. |
0:50.6 | It seems counterintuitive, but that's the way English works. |
0:53.5 | It's called a rhetorical question, and it can end in either a question mark or an exclamation |
0:57.6 | point. |
0:58.6 | And in dialogue, you can sometimes even have a speaker's rhetorical question and an |
1:02.2 | period. |
1:04.4 | Another example of a rhetorical question is, isn't she leaving? |
1:08.9 | That question means you think the woman is leaving, but you want to confirm. |
... |
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