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The question of tag questions:

A comparison across patterns, languages and genres

Mara de los ngeles Gmez Gonzlez


University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
Genre- and Register-Related Text and Discourse Features in Multilingual Corpora
11-12 January 2013
www.mariehaps.be/lsb2013

Previous literature on English tag questions has mainly concentrated on


describing their pragmatics and formal properties (e.g. Algeo 1988, 1990; Holmes
1983, 1984; Kimps 2007), as well as the gender and age differences in their usage
(e.g. Cameron et al. 1989; Coates 1988, 1996; Holmes 1986, 1995; Lakoff 1975;
Stenstrm 1997, 2005). A similar situation is found in Spanish (Briz 1988; Christl
1996; Rodrguez Muoz 2009) and Portuguese (Cruz Ferreira 1981; Moniz et al
2011) with research mostly focusing on the pragmatics of tags question in spoken
discourse. Quantitative investigations are less numerous (e.g. Algeo 1988, 1990;
Tottie and Hoffman 2009), and similarly few in number are those studies
exploring tag questions within the varieties of one language (Algeo 2006; Tottie
and Hoffman 2006) or those undertaking cross-linguistic investigations (Allerton
2009; Axelsson 2006; Brown and Enfield 2006; Martins 2004; Recsky 2006).
In my talk I will present an extensive analysis of canonical tag questions
(CTQs), exemplified in (1) to (3), that is contrastive from three different angles:
patterns, languages and genres. I will compare variation patterns of CTQs within
the same language and across three different languages, British English,
Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese, in a variety of spoken genres that
represent the monologic-dialogic, formal-informal and private-public
oppositions.
(1) I think we've had enough with gigs, dont you? <ICE-GB: S1A-032#230:2:D>
(2) //* BEA: pero yo creo que todo el mundo estamos igual/ no? <C-ORAL-
ROM efamdl13>
but I believe that everybody is the same, arent they?
(3) /mas no quer dizer que ns adoptemos / no ? <C-ORAL-ROM
pfamcv03>
'but it doesn't mean we are adopting (it), does it?
Supported by statistical significance tests, my aim is to examine the
statements made about CTQs in the qualitative literature uncovering, at the same
time, whatever differences and parallelisms emerge from this triangular
comparison along the following parameters: (i) patterns of formal variation, (ii)
functional or pragmatic features and (iii) the sociolinguistic variables of age and
gender.
The corpora analyzed are, for English, the spoken component of the
International Corpus of English-Great Britain (ICE-GB) (Nelson, Wallis, and Aarts
1
2002) and, for Spanish and Portuguese, the corresponding subcorpora of the
Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages (C-ORAL-ROM)
(Cresti and Moneglia 2005).

References
Algeo, John
1988 The tag question in British English: It's different i'n'it? English
World-Wide 9: 171-191.
1990 Its a myth, innit? Politeness and the English tag question. In C.
Ricks and L. Michaels (eds.), The State of the Language. Berkeley:
University of California Press. 443-50
2006 British or American English? Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Allerton, David
2009 Tag questions. In G. Rohdenburg and J. Schlter (eds.), One
Language, Two Grammars: Differences between British and
American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 306-
323.
Axelsson, Karin
2006 Tag questions in English translations from Swedish and Norwegian
are there differences? Svenska som kllsprk och mlsprk.
Aspekter p versttningsvetenskap: artiklar frn en forskarkurs vid
Gteborgs universitet hstterminen 2005 (versttningsstudier vid
Gteborgs universitet 9), red. av Birgitta Englund Dimitrova och
Hans Landqvist, 421. Gteborg: versttarutbildningen vid
Humanistiska fakulteten.
Briz Antonio
1998 El Espaol Coloquial en la Conversacin. Barcelona: Ariel.
Brown, Penny, and Nick Enfield
2006 Epistemic dimensions of polar questions: declarative questions and
tag questions in comparative perspective, Questions and their
Responses [on line], Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, NJ
Enfield, JP de Ruiter, http://www.mpi.nl/publications/escidoc-
1180620/?.
Cameron, Deborah, Fiona McAlinden, and Kathy OLeary
1989 Lakoff in context: The social and linguistic functions of tag
questions. In J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds.), Women in Their
Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex.
London: Longman. 74-93.
Christl, Joachim
1996 Muletillas en el espaol hablado. In T. Kotschi, W. Oesterreicher
and K. Zimmermann (eds.), El Espaol Hablado y la Cultura Oral en
Espaa e Hispanoamrica. Madrid: Vervuert. 117-143.
2
Coates, Jennifer
1988 Gossip revisited: Language in all-female groups. In Coates, J. & D.
Cameron (eds.), Women in their speech communities. London:
Longman. 94-122.
1996 Women Talk. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Cresti, E. and M. Moneglia
2005 C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance
Languages. DVD + vol. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena
1981 Tag questions in Portuguese: Grammar and intonation. Phonetica
38: 341-352.
Holmes, Jane
1983 The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal
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Kimps, Ditte
2007 Declarative constant polarity tag questions: A data-driven analysis
of their form, meaning and attitudinal senses. Paper Presented at
34th Meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and
Medieval English, Ann Arbor, MI.
Lakoff, Robin
1975 Language and Womans Place. New York: Harper and Row.
Martins, Ana
2006 Emphatic affirmation and polarity: Contrasting European
Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and
Galician. In J. Doetjes, and P. Gonzlez (eds.), Romance Languages
and Linguistic Theory. Selected papers from Going Romance,
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Moniz, Maria, Fernando Batista, Isabel Trancoso, Ana I. Mata
2011 Analysis of interrogatives in different domains. Proceedings of the
Third COST 2102 international training school conference on
Toward autonomous, adaptive, and context-aware multimodal
interfaces: theoretical and practical issues. 134-146
Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts
2002 Exploring Natural Language: The British Component of the
International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Recsky, Leonardo
2006 Epistemic modality and spoken discourse: an English-Portuguese
crosslinguistic investigation. Linguagem & Ensino 9.1: 159-185.
Rodrguez Muoz
2009 Estudio sobre las funciones pragmadiscursivas de eh? no? en el
espaol hablado. Revista de Lingstica Terica y Aplicada
Concepcin (Chile) 47.1. 83-101
Stenstrm, Anna-Brita
1997 Tags in teenage talk. In From lfric to the New York Times. In U.
Fries, V. Mller, and P. Schneider (eds.), Studies in English Corpus
Linguistics, Amsterdam: Rodopi. 139-47.
2005 Teenagers tags in London and Madrid. In K. McCafferty, T. Bull, and
K. Killie (eds.), Contexts - Historical, Social, Linguistic. Studies in
Celebration of Toril Swan. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. 279-91.
Tottie, Gunnel and Sebastian Hoffmann
2006 Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English
Linguistics 34.4: 1-29.
2009 Tag questions in English. Journal of English Linguistics 37.2. 130-
161.

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