English Tag Questions: Corpus Findings and Theoretical Implications

Abstract

In terms of formal properties, canonical English tag questions are sensitive to three main factors: the choice of auxiliary and pronoun, polarity (negation), and intonation pattern. Even though the general uses of tag questions follows the described constraints, their actual use in real life appears to be much more complex. This paper aims to report the corpus findings of English tag questions from the ICEGB (International Corpus of English, Great Britian) and show that the corpus data reveal complex variations. In particular, we discuss the properties of reverse and constant polarity tag, situational tag, subjectless tag constructions. We then sketch a constructional analysis that can capture the fact that canonical as well as noncanonical tag question constructions all have much in common, but dier among themselves. We also hint that all these tag constructions are linked as a network of constructions in which specific constructions inherit general properties from their supertype constructions while they have their own constructional constraints.