Question tags in translation
An investigation into the translatability of English question tags into Dutch
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.
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
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Buysse, Lieven
2022.
Counterexpectational Translations: The Dutch Markers Toch and Eigenlijk Contrasted with Their English Correspondents.
Contrastive Pragmatics ► pp. 1 ff.

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