Rhetorical and Deliberative Questions

Some questions don't want the information they seem to ask for. A rhetorical question asserts something the speaker treats as obvious — Cine știe? ("Who knows?") really means "nobody knows." A deliberative question genuinely wonders, but about what should or could be done rather than about a fact — Ce să fac? ("What am I to do?") asks you to weigh options, not to report a fact. The two are close cousins, and in Romanian they run on the same engine: the conjunctiv with să. Once you see how the standalone să marks an action as not-yet-real — to be decided, or impossible to help — both families fall into place at once. This page focuses on that conjunctiv core; the wider world of echo questions and tags is on the echo, rhetorical, and tag questions page.

Deliberative questions: "what am I to do?"

A deliberative question asks about a course of action that has not been chosen yet — the speaker is deliberating, turning over options, often a bit at a loss. Romanian forms these with a standalone conjunctiv: a question word, then să + the verb, with no governing verb in front of it. Where English reaches for a modal ("what should I do?", "where are we to go?"), Romanian just uses the bare să-form, which already carries that "what-am-I-supposed-to" flavor.

The English "should / am to / supposed to" is doing the work that the bare să does in Romanian. There is no separate Romanian modal here — Ce să fac? is the whole construction. This is why the conjunctiv is the natural mood for a question that is really a piece of out-loud thinking: the conjunctiv marks an action that is not (yet) a fact but a possibility under consideration. (The broader grammar of să in questions and commands — including its use to soften suggestions — is on the să in questions and commands page.)

The intensified deliberative: Ce să mă fac?

A heightened, more anxious version uses the reflexive: Ce să mă fac? — literally "what am I to make of myself?" — meaning "what on earth am I to do (with myself)?" It is the cry of someone genuinely stuck, stronger than the plain Ce să fac?

Rhetorical questions: asking in order to assert

A rhetorical question wears a question's clothing but makes a statement. The speaker isn't fishing for information; they are driving home a point the answer to which they take to be obvious — usually "nobody," "nothing," or "obviously." Romanian has a small, very common stock of these, and several of the most idiomatic ones are themselves frozen conjunctiv phrases.

Plain rhetoricals (no conjunctiv)

Each looks like a content question but functions as an assertion. Cine știe? is not a request for a name — answering it with a name misses the point entirely; it means "there's no way to know." Read literally, these will trip you up; read as assertions, they are transparent.

Frozen-conjunctiv rhetoricals

Here is the genuinely Romanian-specific corner. A family of resigned or emphatic rhetoricals is built on the standalone conjunctiv — the same să machinery as the deliberatives, but hardened into set idioms. They no longer ask anything; they express resignation, dismissal, or emphatic agreement.

The thing to notice is that these are built exactly like deliberative questions — question word + standalone să — but they have lexicalized into fixed expressions. Ce să-i faci? could in principle be a real deliberative ("what should I do to it?"), but in practice it has frozen into the resigned "what can you do?" Learn each as a whole unit; don't parse it word by word, and don't try to answer it as if it were a live question. English gets the same resigned tone with a modal — "what can you do," "how should I know" — so the form is unlike English even though the meaning maps neatly.

Deliberative vs rhetorical: the same form, two stances

Because both use the standalone conjunctiv, the only thing that separates a live deliberative from a frozen rhetorical is whether the speaker is actually weighing an answer. Ce să fac? spoken by someone genuinely stuck, looking to you, is deliberative — it invites help. Ce să-i faci? spoken with a shrug after bad news is rhetorical — it invites nothing but a sympathetic nod. The grammar is identical; the stance is what differs, and context and intonation carry it.

Common Mistakes

The errors are about reading rhetoricals literally, and about building deliberatives with English-style modals instead of the bare să.

Don't take a rhetorical literally and try to answer it:

Don't build a deliberative with an English-style modal calque:

Don't use the indicative where a deliberative needs the conjunctiv:

Don't parse a frozen idiom literally and rebuild it:

Key Takeaways

• Deliberative questions ask "what am I to do?" with a standalone conjunctiv: question word + să
  • verb, no helping verb (Ce să fac? Unde să mergem? Cui să-i spun?).
• The reflexive Ce să mă fac? is the more anxious "whatever am I to do?"
• Rhetorical questions assert rather than ask (Cine știe? = nobody knows; Cui îi pasă? = nobody cares; La ce bun? = it's pointless).
• Many key rhetoricals are frozen conjunctiv idioms (Ce să-i faci?, De unde să știu?, Cum să nu?) — learn them whole.
• Deliberative and frozen-rhetorical share the same form; only the speaker's stance (genuinely weighing vs resigned) tells them apart.
• The conjunctiv is the engine of both because it marks the action as not-yet-real — to be decided, or impossible to help.