Pragmatics of interrogative questions in poems of Fereydoon Moshiri

questions. Linguists and rhetoric experts have proposed a variety of semantic and pragmatic functions for these sentences. The poems of Fereydoun Moshiri, to reinforce its influence and instill the meaning in the mind of the readers, are home to several semantic and pragmatic functions. Due to its high frequency, this is one of distinctive features of Moshiri’s style that distinguishes him from his contemporaries. This study, adopting a descriptive-analytical approach by analyzing the linguistic functions of interrogative propositions in Moshiri’s poems, seeks to investigate communicative competences of these propositions. For this purpose, 525 lines of poems composed by Fereydoun Moshiri were analyzed, out of which 363 interrogative sentences with a variety of functions were identified. The results indicate that interrogative propositions in poems of Moshiri have 24 semantic and pragmatic functions. The plurality of semantic and pragmatic functions suggest that the writer of these poems has been cognizant of linguistic and rhetorical devices and employed a soft, smooth and simple language with greatest subtleties and intricacies.