Rhetorical Questions in LLM Representations: A Linear Probing Study

arXiv:2604.14128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rhetorical questions are asked not to seek information but to persuade or signal stance. How large language models internally represent them remains unclear. We analyze rhetorical questions in LLM representations using linear probes on two social-media datasets with different discourse contexts, and find that rhetorical signals emerge early and are most stably captured by last-token representations. Rhetorical questions are linearly separable fro