Abstract
AbstractThis paper addresses semantic/pragmatic variability of tag questions in German and makes three main contributions. First, we document the prevalence and variety of question tags in German across three different types of conversational corpora. Second, by annotating question tags according to their syntactic and semantic context, discourse function, and pragmatic effect, we demonstrate the existing overlap and differences between the individual tag variants. Finally, we distinguish several groups of question tags by identifying the factors that influence the speakers’ choices of tags in the conversational context, such as clause type, function, speaker/hearer knowledge, as well as conversation type and medium. These factors provide the limits of variability by constraining certain question tags in German against occurring in specific contexts or with individual functions.
Highlights
Tag questions (TQs) are a crosslinguistically attested phenomenon typical of spoken conversations
We address three main questions: First, as a phenomenon typical of conversations, can we find TQs in the spoken as well as the written medium, and does the medium have an effect on the distribution of tag variants shown in (1)? Second, can we identify which context properties influence the choice of question tags?4 And third, which tag variants are interchangeable in which contexts, and what are their individual syntactic and pragmatic constraints? By
We investigate the discourse variability of German TQs in three conversational corpora: private telephone conversations in the CallHome German corpus (Karins et al 1997), in-person dialogs between strangers in the GECO corpus (Schweitzer and Lewandowski 2013), and a corpus of Twitter messages (Scheffler 2014) that captures informal language in written form
Summary
Tag questions (TQs) are a crosslinguistically attested phenomenon typical of spoken conversations. In contrast to reverse polarity TQs, which often ask for affirmation or confirmation of the anchor proposition that the speaker is unsure about, same polarity tags usually indicate that the hearer has authority over the situation or is seen as the potential source of the expressed proposition (Cattell 1973; Farkas and Roelofsen 2012; Malamud and Stephenson 2015). This kind of TQs may for example be used to express the speaker’s surprise by repeating something that was just said (Huddleston and Pullum 2008: 895). This kind of TQs may for example be used to express the speaker’s surprise by repeating something that was just said (Huddleston and Pullum 2008: 895). Kimps (2007: 281) discusses the functions of same polarity tags in detail proposing two basic functions (evidential modification and turn allocation) as well as secondary “attitudinal” uses
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