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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:2 (2017) ► pp.157–182

Question tags in translation

An investigation into the translatability of English question tags into Dutch

 | KU Leuven
Canonical question tags feature prominently in spoken English, where they display great versatility. At face value they are meant to elicit a response from a co-participant in the form of (dis)agreement with the proposition to which the tag has been added. Their pragmatic scope is, however, considerably broader: they serve as politeness strategies but also emphasize the speaker’s convictions or mark accusations. Like many other languages, Dutch does not have a similar structure, which raises questions as to what devices Dutch employs to serve the same purpose as question tags. This contrastive study examines such correspondents in a parallel corpus of English novels and their Dutch translations. Three structures can be identified: pragmatic markers, clause-final parentheticals and combinations of these. The data indicate a preference for pragmatic markers (most notably hè and toch), which predominantly appear either as invariant tags or clause-medially, indicating subtle shifts in utterance interpretation.
Keywords: question tags, pragmatics, translation, fiction, English/Dutch, parallel corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Dutch correspondents of English question tags
    • 3.1Pragmatic markers
      • 3.1.1Pragmatic markers as invariant tags
      • 3.1.2Pragmatic markers in clause-medial position
      • 3.1.3Combination of clause-medial and clause-final pragmatic markers
      • 3.1.4Clause-initial
    • 3.2Clause-final parentheticals
    • 3.3Combinations of clause-medial pragmatic markers and clause-final parentheticals
    • 3.4Others
    • 3.5Zero correspondence
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.2.01buy
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Axelsson, Karin
2020. Questions in English and Swedish fiction texts. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2018. Tag Questions in Conversation [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 83], DOI logo

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