“And your wedding is the twenty-second <.> of June is it?”

Abstract

This chapter addresses the lack of systematic research into the use of tag questionsin Irish English on a formal and functional level by conducting an exploratorygenre-specific analysis of tag questions in service encounters in IrishEnglish. Tag question usage is compared with previous findings from referencecorpora of Irish English, British English and American English. The study pointsto many similarities between tag questions across genre and variety but alsoshows features which appear particular to present day Irish English, such as theuse of sure-tags a higher frequency of the operator BE, a more frequent canonicaluse of “is it?” tag questions and a high use of interrogative anchors. In addition,the confirmation-eliciting function was employed particularly frequently in thecanonical tag questions recorded in the service encounter data. Further researchis required to investigate whether this findings was genre-related or varietyrelated.Finally, non-concordant tag uses were found to be uncommon, a findingwhich contrasts with previous research on Irish English. The paper closes with aplea for an increase in cross-variational analyses of tag questions.