Today’s Rhymes With Orange takes up indirect speech acts, in particular the complex case of interrogatives in the form of declaratives (with interrogative intonation), but in fact serving the function of exclamations (with imperative force):
It starts with the declarative You’re really going out dressed like that, with really signalling emphasis, surprise, or disbelief, and rising final intonation signalling a question. So, roughly, ‘Is it really true that you’re going out dressed like that?’
Then this question — like yes-no questions in general — can function as a “rhetorical question”, conveying an assertion with the opposite polarity (‘You’re not going out dressed like that’), having judgmental or directive force (‘You shouldn’t go out dressed like that; don’t go out dressed like that’).
All these steps are conventionalized in English, so that the recipient of the original can move seamlessly from question to judgment. Compare the title of Deborah Tannen’s 2006 book You’re Wearing that?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.
Then of course there’s the portmanteau qudgment (question + judgment). The literature on indirect speech acts includes discussions of the whimperative (wh-question + imperative -- Why don’t you kiss me? ’Kiss me!’) and queclarative (question + declarative – Is that necessary? ‘That isn’t necessary’), from Jerry Sadock in 1970 and 1971, respectively.
