Discourse markers are a feature of everyday conversation — they signal attitudes and beliefs to their interlocutors beyond the base utterance. One particular type of discourse marker is the invariant tag (InT), for example New Zealand and Canadian English eh. Previous studies of InTs have clearly described InT uses in one language variety (e.g. Berland 1997, on London teenage talk; Stubbe and Holmes 1995, on NZ English; on sociolinguistic features e.g. Stubbe and Holmes 1995 and on single markers e.g. Avis 1972; Love 1973; Gibson 1977; Meyerhoff 1992 and 1994; Gold 2005, 2008 on eh). However, the class of InTs has not yet been fully described, and the variety of approaches taken (corpus- and survey-based) does not easily allow for cross-varietal or cross-linguistic comparison. This study investigates InTs in three varieties of English from a corpus-based approach. It lists the InTs available in New Zealand, British and Indian English through their occurrences in their respective International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, and compares usages of four tags across the varieties. The description offers a clearer overview of the InT class for descriptive grammars, as well as more explicit definitions and usage guides for e.g. EFL/ESL pedagogy. An unambiguous description of several InTs and their meanings will also allow more thorough comparison in studies of other English varieties. Finally, the results offer another viewpoint on the issue of representativeness in corpora with respect to regional versus national varieties of the Englishes.
2024. Developing a Comparative Model of Predicted Associations for Invariable Question Tag Types in British English and European Portuguese. In Constructional and Cognitive Explorations of Contrastive Linguistics, ► pp. 173 ff.
Clausen, Yulia & Tatjana Scheffler
2022. A corpus-based analysis of meaning variations in German tag questions Evidence from spoken and written conversational corpora. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 18:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Collins, Peter Craig
2022. Comment markers in world Englishes. World Englishes 41:2 ► pp. 244 ff.
de los Ángeles Gómez González, María & Maria da Purificação Moura Silvano
2022. A functional model for the tag question paradigm: The case of invariable tag questions in English and Portuguese. Lingua 272 ► pp. 103255 ff.
Kimps, Ditte & Gerard O’Grady
2022. Overlapping Reactions During Tag Questions. <i>WORD</i> 68:3 ► pp. 253 ff.
Kortmann, Bernd
2020. Syntactic Variation in English. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 299 ff.
Lange, Claudia & Sven Leuckert
2020. Tag Questions and Gender in Indian English. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 69 ff.
Westphal, Michael
2020. Question Tags in Philippine English. Corpus Pragmatics 4:4 ► pp. 401 ff.
Westphal, Michael
2021. Question tags across New Englishes. World Englishes
Westphal, Michael
2022. The Multilingual Pragmatics of New Englishes: An Analysis of Question Tags in Nigerian English. Frontiers in Communication 6
2015. Tag questions across Irish English and British English: A corpus analysis of form and function. Multilingua 34:4 ► pp. 495 ff.
PALACIOS MARTÍNEZ, IGNACIO
2015. Variation, development and pragmatic uses ofinnitin the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics 19:3 ► pp. 383 ff.
Tomaselli, Maria Vittoria & Albert Gatt
2015. Italian tag questions and their conversational functions. Journal of Pragmatics 84 ► pp. 54 ff.
Barron, Anne
2014. Variational Pragmatics. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff.
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