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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

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

Variable and invariable tag questions in spoken British English

 | University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Published online: 20 September 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.05gom
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Previous studies and the present study
    • 1.1The tag question construction
    • 1.2Variable and invariable TQs in English
    • 1.3Structure of this study
  • 2.Research questions and data mining
  • 3.Discussion of findings
    • 3.1RQ # 1: Frequency and formal features
    • 3.2RQ # 2: Functional overlap
    • 3.3RQ # 3: Gender trend
    • 3.4RQ # 4: Age trend
    • 3.5RQ # 5: Genre type trend
  • 4.Conclusions and prospects for further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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2024. Introduction. In Constructional and Cognitive Explorations of Contrastive Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Silvano, Purificação & María Gómez González
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. DOI logo
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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. DOI 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. DOI logo
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2020. Question Tags in Philippine English. Corpus Pragmatics 4:4 ► pp. 401 ff. DOI logo
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2021. Question tags across New Englishes. World Englishes DOI logo
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2022. The Multilingual Pragmatics of New Englishes: An Analysis of Question Tags in Nigerian English. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo
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