Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s (re-run) Calvin and Hobbes:

Hobbes poses a hypothetical question to Calvin: suppose you knew …, then what would you do? Stated as a question, but functioning (indirectly) as a threatening instruction to do a specific thing (not named in the question, but inferrable from the context): do this, and today will not be the last day of your life — that is, DO THIS!

This entry was posted on September 14, 2014 at 4:48 am and is filed under Context, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.