does and is (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Victor Steinbok]

Does the sun rise in the East? Actually, this might have been one of
those faux-Chinese-wisdom queries used in pseudo-Socratic dialogue in
one of David Carradine's Eastern moments.

Does a cat lick his balls? And, no, I am not talking about David
Carradine this time...

I am curious if there is a third category of interrogatives that
involves predictions of a certain future (Will the sun rise tomorrow?).

     VS-)

On 2/23/2011 3:54 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 8:05 PM +0000 2/23/11, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>> In the parlance of folklorists (and a few other sorts of scholars),
>> these expressions are commonly called "sarcastic interrogatives" or
>> "sarcastic interrogative affirmatives" and ". . . negatives."  I
>> myself coined the somewhat awkward terms back in 1975.  A recent
>> discussion:
>>
>> Charles Clay Doyle, "Is the Pope Still Catholic?  Historical
>> Obsrvations on Sarcastic Interrogatives," _Western Folklore_ 67
>> (2008): 5-33.
>>
>> --Charlie
> There are also sarcastic conjunctions ("And I'm Marie of
> Romania"--wasn't there a Dorothy Parker poem on this theme?) and
> conditionals ("If p, I'm a monkey's uncle/I'll eat my hat" or the
> earlier "I'm a Dutchman if I do"), although the latter is more
> broadly rhetorical rather than simply sarcastic.
>
> Oh, and we shouldn't forget the blends:
> "Is the bear Catholic?"
> "Does a Pope shit in the woods?"
>
> LH

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