Two Types of Argumentation Involving Rhetorical Questions 37 speaker’s intentions in making the argument. Arguments may also be judged from the perspective of effectiveness. An argument is effective, or successful, if it achieves its goal. An important point made by Walton is that arguments in natural dialogue are often not intended to be logically valid. In a valid argument, the truth of the conclusion follows from the truth of the premises. An example is the syllogism “All A’s are B. X is an A. Therefore, X is B.” If the first two premises are true, then it is also true that X is B. Many arguments in everyday conversation, in contrast, are “presumptive”, shifting the burden of proof to the addressee to show that the conclusion is not true(29). Walton argues that some logically invalid arguments can be effectively used as presumptive rather than deductive arguments (30). Walton’s views are directly relevant to understanding the Biblical use of RQs in argumentation, as shown below. 3. The data for the study The corpus for the study is the prose portions of Genesis through Kings(31). The questions in the corpus were located by means of computerized searches for the various interrogative particles (32). Clauses with alh were omitted due to the difficulty in distinguishing questions with the interrogative-negative combination alh from affirmative assertions with the homonymous clausal adverb alh (33). Unmarked yes-no questions were excluded as well, due to the impossibility of finding these by (29) See, e.g., WALTON, Argument Structure, 240, 245; WALTON, The New Dialectic, 41. (30) D. WALTON, Informal Fallacies. Towards a Theory of Argument Criticisms (Pragmatics & Beyond 4; Amsterdam 1987) 3-4; D. WALTON, Argumentation Schemes. (31) The text for the study is the MT, as represented in BHS. I follow BHS in categorizing passages as prose or poetry. Translations are my own, based primarily on NJPS and NRSV. (32) Clauses containing the formally identical exclamatory particles (i.e., hm, ˚ya) were excluded from the results of the search. There are clear syntactic differences between the homonymous interrogative and exclamatory particles, as pointed out by STEINER, “Mah Nishtanna”, 16-17; for example, hm in exclamations functions as an adverb of degree (e.g., Num 24,5 wbf hm “how beautiful”), while hm in questions is most frequently a pronoun (e.g., 1 Sam 20,1 ytyç[ hm “what did I do”) or an adverb of manner (e.g., Gen 44,16 qdfxn hm “how can we prove our innocence?”). On the relation between RQs and exclamations, see below. (33) On the clausal adverb alh see J. BLAU, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Porta Linguarum Orientalium Neue Serie 12; Wiesbaden 21993) §103.3; M.L. BROWN, “‘Is it Not?’ or ‘Indeed!’: HL in Northwest Semitic”, Maarav 4 (1987) 201-219; A. MOSHAVI, “Syntactic Evidence for a Clausal Adverb alh in Biblical Hebrew”, JNSL 33 (2007) 51- 63; D. SIVAN – W. SCHNIEDEWIND, “Letting Your ‘Yes’ Be ‘No’ in Ancient Israel: A Study of the Asseverative al and aløh'”, JSS 38 (1993) 209-226; R.C. STEINER, review of J. BLAU, An Adverbial Construction in Hebrew and Arabic. Sentence Adverbials in Frontal Position Separated from the Rest of the Sentence, Afroasiatic Linguistics 6 (1979) 147- 149. Since any negative RQ can be reformulated as an assertion consisting of the affirmative implication of the question, it is generally impossible to prove that a alh clause is a negative RQ as opposed to an assertion with the clausal adverb; thus there is no way to know whether rmal ˚yla ytrbd alh (Num 23,26) is “Didn’t I tell you”, or “I told you!” Note that the opposite is not the case; there are many cases in which syntactic and/or pragmatic criteria suffice to demonstrate that alh must represent the clausal