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

María de los Ángeles Gómez González | 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: variable and invariable question tags, tag questions

Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.05gom

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.

Algeo, John

1988 “The Tag Question in British English: It’s Different i’n’it?” English World-Wide 9: 171–191.

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.

2006 British or American English? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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.

Andersen, Gisle

2001 Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Axelsson, Karin

2011a “A Cross-Linguistic Study of Grammatically Dependent Question Tags: Data and Theoretical Implications.” Studies in Language 35 (4): 793–851.

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.

Bald, Wolf-Dietrich

1979 “English Tag Questions and Intonation.” In Anglistentag, ed. by Kuno Schumann, 263–292. Berlin: Technische Universität.

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.

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.

Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech

2003 Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman: Harlow.

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan

1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

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.

Bonsignori, Veronica

2013 English Tags: A Close-Up on Film Language, Dubbing and Conversation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Brazil, David

2008 “Tag Questions.” Ilha do Desterro 5 (11): 28–44.

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.

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.

Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy

2006 A Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and Writen English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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.

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.

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.

1996 Women Talk. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Columbus, Georgie

2010 “A Comparative Analysis of Invariant Tags in Three Varieties of English.” English World-Wide 31 (3): 288–310.

Cortés, Luis, and María Matilde Camacho

2005 Unidades de Segmentación y Marcadores del Discurso. Madrid: Arco Libros.

Dehé, Nicole, and Bettina Braun

2013 “The Prosody of Question Tags in English.” English Language and Linguistics 17 (1): 129–156.

Dehé, Nicole

2014 Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax–Prosody Relation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DeLancey, Scott

2001 “The Mirative and Evidentiality.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (3): 369–382.

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.

Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet

2003 Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Field, Andy

2009 Discovering Statistics Using SPSS, 3rd edn. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington: Sage.

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.

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.

Fraser, Bruce

1996 “Pragmatic Markers.” Pragmatics 6 (2): 167–190.

Ginzburg, Jonathan, and Ivan Sag

2000 Interrogative Investigations: The Form, Meaning and Use of English Interrogatives. Stanford: CSLI.

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.

2014 “Canonical Tag Questions in English, Spanish and Portuguese: A Discourse-Functional Study.” Languages in Contrast 14 (1): 93–126.

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.

González, Montserrat

2004 Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narratives: The Case of English and Catalan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harris, Patricia H.

1972 “The Use of Tag Questions, Tag-Like Responses, and Non-Tags.” Transactions of the Missouri Academy of Science: 62–82.

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.

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.

Holmes, Janet

1983 “The Functions of Tag Questions.” English Language Research Journal 3: 40–65.

1984 “Hedging your Bets and Sitting on the Fence: Some Evidence for Hedges as Support Structures.” Te Reo 27: 47–62.

1986 “Functions of you know in Women’s and Men’s Speech.” Language in Society 15: 1–21.

1995 Women, Men and Politeness. White Plains, NY: Longman.

Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum

2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huddleston, Rodney

1970 “Two Approaches to the Analysis of Tags.” Journal of Linguistics 6: 215–222.

Hudson, Richard

1975 “The Meaning of Questions.” Language 51 (1): 1–31.

Jespersen, Otto

1924 The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen, and Unwin.

Kay, Paul

2002 “English Subjectless Tag Questions.” Language 78: 453–481.

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.

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.

Kimps, Ditte, and Kristin Davidse

2008 “Illocutionary Force and Conduciveness in Imperative Constant Polarity Tag Questions: A Typology.” Text and Talk 28: 699–722.

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.

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.

Knowles, John

1980 “The Tag as a Parenthetical.” Studies in Language 4 (3): 379–409.

König, Ekkehard, and Volker Gast

2012 Understanding English-German Contrasts. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.

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.

Labov, William, and David Fanshel

1977 Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.

Lakoff, Robin

1975 Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.

Langendoen, D. Terence

1970 Essentials of English Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Lapadat, Judy, and Maureen Seesahai

1977 “Male versus Female Codes in Informal Contexts.” Sociolinguistics Newsletter 8: 7–8.

Martin, J. R.

1992 English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

McCawley, James D.

1998 The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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.

1997 Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.

McMillan, Julie, Kay Cliftin, Diane McGrath, and Wanda Gale

1977 “Women’s Language: Uncertainty or Interpersonal Sensitivity and Emotionality.” Sex Roles 3: 545–559.

Mithun, Marianne

2012 “Tags: Cross-Linguistic Diversity and Commonality.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 2165–2182.

Moore, Emma, and Robert Podesva

2009 “Style, Indexicality, and the Social Meaning of Tag Questions.” Language in Society 38 (4): 283–311.

Müller, Simone

2005 Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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.

Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts

2002 Exploring Natural Language: The British Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Norrick, Neal

1995 “Hunh-Tags and Evidentiality in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 687–692.

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.

Pichler, Heike

2013 The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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.

Portolés, José

1998 Marcadores del discurso. Barcelona: Ariel.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik

1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

Recsky, Leonardo

2006 “Epistemic Modality and Spoken Discourse: An English-Portuguese Crosslinguistic Investigation.” Linguagem e Ensino 9 (1): 159–185.

Rigney, Azucena C.

1999 “Questioning in Interpreted Testimony.” Forensic Linguistics 6 (1): 83–108.

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.

Roesle, Andrea

2001 Tag Questions in British and American English. M.A. thesis, University of Zurich.

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.

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.

Stenström, Anna-Brita

1984 Questions and Responses in English Conversation. Lund Studies in English 68. Lund: Liber/Gleerups.

1994 An Introduction to Spoken Interaction. London: Longman.

1997 “Tags in Teenage Talk.” In Studies in English corpus linguistics, ed. by Udo Fries, Viviane Müller, and Peter Schneider, 139–147. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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.

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.

Takahashi, Mariko

2014 “A Comparative Study of Tag Questions in Four Asian Englishes from a Corpus-Based Approach.” Asian Englishes 16 (2): 101–124.

Todd, Peyton

1982 “Tagging after Red Herrings. Evidence Against the Processing Capacity Explanation in Child Language.” Journal of Child Language 9: 99–114.

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.

Tottie, Gunnel, and Sebastian Hoffmann

2006 “Tag Questions in British and American English.” Journal of English Linguistics 34: 283–311.

2009 “Tag Questions in English: The First Century.” Journal of English Linguistics 37 (2): 130–161.

Ultan, Russell

1969 “Some General Characteristics of Interrogative Systems.” Working Papers on Language Universals 1: 41–63.

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.

Cited by

Cited by other publications

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.

Westphal, Michael

2020. Question Tags in Philippine English. Corpus Pragmatics

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 february 2020. 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.