Chapter published in:
The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 109–144

“God that came out quick didn’t it eh”

Variable and invariable tag questions in spoken British English

| University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
This study compares and contrasts British English variable tag questions, i.e. those containing a grammatically dependent question tag (e.g. isn’t it?), with invariable ones, i.e. those containing lexical tag questions (e.g. right?). Results are reported for five research questions concerning the (i) formal and (ii) functional characteristics of variable and invariable tag questions, as well as the factors motivating the choice of one type over the other, namely (iii) gender, (iv) age and (v) genre. Based on a sample of 858 tag questions, my findings suggest that British English shows a consistently higher preference for variable tag questions (717 vs. 141 tokens). Further differences and parallelisms are revealed for formal, functional, sociolinguistic and distributional conditions, raising new implications for further inquiry.
Keywords: tag questions, variable and invariable question tags
Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.05gom
References

References

Aijmer, Karin
1979 “The Function of Tag Questions in English.” In Papers from the Fifth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, ed. by Tore Pettersson, 9–17. Lund, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Lundensis and Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.Google Scholar
Algeo, John
1988 “The Tag Question in British English: It’s Different i’n’it?” English World-Wide 9: 171–191.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1990 “It’s a Myth, innit? Politeness and the English Tag Question.” In The State of the Language, ed. by Christopher Ricks, and Leonard Michaels, 443–450. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
2006 British or American English? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Allerton, David
2009 “Tag Questions.” In One Language, Two Grammars: Differences between British and American English, ed. by Günter Rohdenburg, and Julia Schlüter, 306–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Andersen, Gisle
2001 Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Axelsson, Karin
2011a “A Cross-Linguistic Study of Grammatically Dependent Question Tags: Data and Theoretical Implications.” Studies in Language 35 (4): 793–851.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011b Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogues. Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Gothenburg. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press.
2014 “Confirmation-Demanding Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogue.” In Subjectivity and Epistemicity: Stance Strategies in Discourse and Narration, ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Mette Sjölin. Lund Studies in English 117, 165–185. Lund: Lund University.Google Scholar
Bald, Wolf-Dietrich
1979 “English Tag Questions and Intonation.” In Anglistentag, ed. by Kuno Schumann, 263–292. Berlin: Technische Universität.Google Scholar
Barron, Anne, Irina Pandarova, and Karoline Muderack
2015 “Tag Questions across Irish English and British English: A Corpus Analysis of Form and Function.” Multilingua 34 (4): 495–525.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berry, Margaret
1981 “Systemic Linguistics and Discourse Analysis: A Multi-Layered Approach to Exchange Structure.” In Studies in Discourse Analysis, ed. by Malcolm Coulthard, and Martin Montgomery, 120–145. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech
2003 Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman: Harlow.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Biscetti, Stefania
2006 “Tag Questions in Courtroom Discourse.” In Studies in Specialized Discourse, ed. by John Flowerdew, and Maurizio Gotti, 209–238. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Bonsignori, Veronica
2013 English Tags: A Close-Up on Film Language, Dubbing and Conversation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Brazil, David
2008 “Tag Questions.” Ilha do Desterro 5 (11): 28–44.Google Scholar
Calnan, Alison, and Marilyn Davidson
1998 “The Impact of Gender and Its Interaction with Role and Status on the Use of Tag Questions in Meetings.” Women in Management Review 13: 19–36.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Deborah, Fiona McAlinden, and Kathy O’Leary
1988 “Lakoff in Context: The Social and Linguistic Functions of Tag Questions.” In Women in Their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex, ed. by Jennifer Coates, and Deborah Cameron, 74–93. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy
2006 A Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and Writen English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Case, Susan
1988 “Cultural Differences, Not Deficiencies: An Analysis of Managerial Women’s Language.” In Women’s Careers: Pathways and Pitfalls, ed. by Laurie Larwood, and Suzanna Rose, 41–63. New York, NY: Praeger.Google Scholar
Cheng, Winnie, and Martin Warren
2001 “ ‘She knows more about Hong Kong than you do isn’t it’: Tags in Hong Kong Conversational English.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (9): 1419–1439.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer
1989 “Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups.” In Women in their Speech Communities, ed. by Jennifer Coates, and Deborah Cameron, 94–122. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1996 Women Talk. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Columbus, Georgie
2010 “A Comparative Analysis of Invariant Tags in Three Varieties of English.” English World-Wide 31 (3): 288–310.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cortés, Luis, and María Matilde Camacho
2005 Unidades de Segmentación y Marcadores del Discurso. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole, and Bettina Braun
2013 “The Prosody of Question Tags in English.” English Language and Linguistics 17 (1): 129–156.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole
2014 Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax–Prosody Relation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, Scott
2001 “The Mirative and Evidentiality.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (3): 369–382.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dubois, Betty Lou, and Isabel Crouch
1975 “The Question of Tag Questions in Women’s Speech: They Don’t Really Use More of Them, Do They.” Language in Society 4 (3): 289–294.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet
2003 Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Field, Andy
2009 Discovering Statistics Using SPSS, 3rd edn. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington: Sage.Google Scholar
Fishman, Pamela
1980 “Conversational Insecurity.” In Language: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. by Howard Giles, Peter Robinson, and Philip Smith, 127–132. New York NY: Pergamon Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson
2003 “Social Interaction and Grammar.” In The New Psychology of Language, ed. by Michael Tomasello, vol. 2, 119–143. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
1996 “Pragmatic Markers.” Pragmatics 6 (2): 167–190.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Jonathan, and Ivan Sag
2000 Interrogative Investigations: The Form, Meaning and Use of English Interrogatives. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Gómez González, María de los Ángeles
2012 “The Question of Tag Questions in English and Spanish.” In Encoding the Past, Decoding the Future: Corpora in the 21st Century, ed. by Isabel Moskowich, and Begoña Crespo, 59–97. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
2014 “Canonical Tag Questions in English, Spanish and Portuguese: A Discourse-Functional Study.” Languages in Contrast 14 (1): 93–126.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “Canonical Tag Questions in English, Spanish and Portuguese: A Discourse-Functional Study.” In Genre- and Register-Related Discourse Features in Contrast, ed. by Marie-Aude Lefer, and Svetlana Vogeleer, 93–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
González, Montserrat
2004 Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narratives: The Case of English and Catalan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Patricia H.
1972 “The Use of Tag Questions, Tag-Like Responses, and Non-Tags.” Transactions of the Missouri Academy of Science: 62–82.Google Scholar
Heritage, John
2011 “Territories of Knowledge, Territories of Experience: Empathic Moments in Interaction.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig, 159–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian, Anne-Katrin Blass, and Joybrato Mukherjee
2014 “Canonical Tag Questions in Asian Englishes: Forms, Functions and Frequencies in Hongkong English, Indian English and Singapore English.” Paper presented at ICAME 32 (the 32nd Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English), Oslo, Norway, 1–5 June 2011.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1983 “The Functions of Tag Questions.” English Language Research Journal 3: 40–65.Google Scholar
1984 “Hedging your Bets and Sitting on the Fence: Some Evidence for Hedges as Support Structures.” Te Reo 27: 47–62.Google Scholar
1986 “Functions of you know in Women’s and Men’s Speech.” Language in Society 15: 1–21.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1995 Women, Men and Politeness. White Plains, NY: Longman.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney
1970 “Two Approaches to the Analysis of Tags.” Journal of Linguistics 6: 215–222.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Richard
1975 “The Meaning of Questions.” Language 51 (1): 1–31.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1924 The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen, and Unwin.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul
2002 “English Subjectless Tag Questions.” Language 78: 453–481.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kimps, Ditt
2007 “Declarative Constant Polarity Tag Questions: A Data-Driven Analysis of their Form, Meaning and Attitudinal Uses”. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2): 270–291.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kimps, Ditte
2016 English Variable Tag Questions: A Typology of their Interpersonal Meaning. Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Leuven. KU Leuven University Press.Google Scholar
Kimps, Ditte, and Kristin Davidse
2008 “Illocutionary Force and Conduciveness in Imperative Constant Polarity Tag Questions: A Typology.” Text and Talk 28: 699–722.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kimps, Ditte, Kristin Davidse, and Bert Cornillie
2014a “A Speech Function Analysis of British English Tag Questions in Spontaneous Dialogue.” Journal of Pragmatics 66: 64–85.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014b “The Speech Functions of Tag Questions and their Properties. A Comparison of their Distribution in COLT and LLC.” In Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns, ed. by Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, and Lieven Vandelanotte, 321–350. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Knowles, John
1980 “The Tag as a Parenthetical.” Studies in Language 4 (3): 379–409.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
König, Ekkehard, and Volker Gast
2012 Understanding English-German Contrasts. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1972 “The Study of Language in its Social Context.” In Language and Social Context, ed. by Pier Paolo Giglioli, 283–307. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Labov, William, and David Fanshel
1977 Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin
1975 Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Langendoen, D. Terence
1970 Essentials of English Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Lapadat, Judy, and Maureen Seesahai
1977 “Male versus Female Codes in Informal Contexts.” Sociolinguistics Newsletter 8: 7–8.Google Scholar
Martin, J. R.
1992 English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McCawley, James D.
1998 The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McGregor, William
1995 “The English ‘Tag Question’: A New Analysis Is(n’t) It?” In On Subject and Theme: A Discourse Functional Perspective, ed. by Ruqaiya Hasan, and Peter H. Fries, 91–121. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1997 Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
McMillan, Julie, Kay Cliftin, Diane McGrath, and Wanda Gale
1977 “Women’s Language: Uncertainty or Interpersonal Sensitivity and Emotionality.” Sex Roles 3: 545–559.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mithun, Marianne
2012 “Tags: Cross-Linguistic Diversity and Commonality.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 2165–2182.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma, and Robert Podesva
2009 “Style, Indexicality, and the Social Meaning of Tag Questions.” Language in Society 38 (4): 283–311.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Simone
2005 Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nässlin, Siv
1984 The English Tag Question: A Study of Sentences Containing Tags of the Type Isn’t it?, Is it? Stockholm: Almqvist, and Wiksell International.Google Scholar
Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts
2002 Exploring Natural Language: The British Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Norrick, Neal
1995 “Hunh-Tags and Evidentiality in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 687–692.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
O’Barr, William M., and Bowman K. Atkins
1980 “ ‘Woman’s Language’ or ‘Powerless Language’?” In Woman and Language in Literature and Society, ed. by Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 93–110. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Pichler, Heike
2013 The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pons Bordería, Salvador
1998 Conexión y Conectores. Estudio de su Relación en el Registro Informal de la Lengua, Anejo XXVII de Cuadernos de Filologia. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia.Google Scholar
Portolés, José
1998 Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Recsky, Leonardo
2006 “Epistemic Modality and Spoken Discourse: An English-Portuguese Crosslinguistic Investigation.” Linguagem e Ensino 9 (1): 159–185.Google Scholar
Rigney, Azucena C.
1999 “Questioning in Interpreted Testimony.” Forensic Linguistics 6 (1): 83–108.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Muñoz, Francisco J.
2009 “Estudio sobre las funciones pragmadiscursivas de ¿eh? ¿no? en el español hablado.” Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada 47 (1): 83–101.Google Scholar
Roesle, Andrea
2001 Tag Questions in British and American English. M.A. thesis, University of Zurich.Google Scholar
Schleef, Erik
2009 “A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Functions and Sociolinguistic Distribution of English and German Tag Questions and Discourse Markers in Academic Speech.” In Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse, ed. by Eija Suomela-Salmi, and Fred Dervin, 61–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, and Karin Aijmer
2007 The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita
1984 Questions and Responses in English Conversation. Lund Studies in English 68. Lund: Liber/Gleerups.Google Scholar
1994 An Introduction to Spoken Interaction. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1997 “Tags in Teenage Talk.” In Studies in English corpus linguistics, ed. by Udo Fries, Viviane Müller, and Peter Schneider, 139–147. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
2005 “Teenagers’ Tags in London and Madrid.” In Contexts – Historical, Social, Linguistic: Studies in Celebration of Toril Swan, ed. by Kevin McCafferty, Tove Bull, and Kristin Killie, 279–291. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Gisle Andersen, and Ingrid Hasund
2002 Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Takahashi, Mariko
2014 “A Comparative Study of Tag Questions in Four Asian Englishes from a Corpus-Based Approach.” Asian Englishes 16 (2): 101–124.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Todd, Peyton
1982 “Tagging after Red Herrings. Evidence Against the Processing Capacity Explanation in Child Language.” Journal of Child Language 9: 99–114.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Torgersen, Eivind, Costas Gabrielatos, Sebastian Hoffmann, and Sue Fox
2011 “A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic markers in London English.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7 (1): 93–118.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel, and Sebastian Hoffmann
2006 “Tag Questions in British and American English.” Journal of English Linguistics 34: 283–311.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 “Tag Questions in English: The First Century.” Journal of English Linguistics 37 (2): 130–161.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ultan, Russell
1969 “Some General Characteristics of Interrogative Systems.” Working Papers on Language Universals 1: 41–63.Google Scholar
1978 “Some General Characteristics of Interrogative Systems.” In Universals of Human Language, Volume 4: Syntax, ed. by Joseph H. Greenberg, 211–248. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Clausen, Yulia & Tatjana Scheffler
2020. A corpus-based analysis of meaning variations in German tag questions Evidence from spoken and written conversational corpora. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0 Crossref logo
Gómez González, María de los Ángeles & Nicole Dehé
2020. The pragmatics and prosody of variable tag questions in English: Uncovering function-to-form correlations. Journal of Pragmatics 158 ► pp. 33 ff. Crossref logo
Westphal, Michael
2020. Question Tags in Philippine English. Corpus Pragmatics 4:4 ► pp. 401 ff. Crossref logo
Westphal, Michael
2021. Question tags across New Englishes. World Englishes Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 may 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.