Overlapping Reactions During Tag Questions

Abstract

This article examines the form and the functions of what we label overlapping reactions. These are premature responses which overlap utterances containing a variable interrogative tag, e.g., It’s nice, isn’t it. They are orientated towards the proposition contained in the tag question. Our research is grounded in a corpus of spoken British English and, employs methods and insights from corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and phonetics. Based on the clustering of observed grammatical, discoursal and prosodic features we propose a typology of the interactional functions of overlapping responses, i.e., acknowledgements, continuers, disagreements, non-committals and turn-competitive early responses. We show that such responses are not errors but rather function as part of the well-oiled machinery of spontaneous dialogue. We show that the typology of overlaps proposed by Jefferson ([1983]. “Two Explorations of the Organization of Overlapping Talk in Conversation.” Language and Literature 28: 1–33) is unable to fully distinguish between the functional categories identified in our data. Hence we suggest that a taxonomy of overlaps must be based on the patterning of formal and functional features. Our data provide evidence that tag questions are responded to a syntagmatic wholes rather than as a sequence of two parts: anchor and tag.