'They are going tomorrow, isn't it?' On the Use of Tag Questions in Indian English and Hong Kong English

Abstract

Tag questions in standard British English (BrE) follow a standard pattern consisting of an operator and a subject. This operator generally coincides with the preceding statement while the auxiliary “do” is the choice when the operator is absent. More importantly, a negative tag is generally attached to a positive statement and vice versa (i.e. you know her, don’t you?) (Quirk et al. 1985: 810).The Asian varieties of English are an exception insofar as apparently no standard rule is observed. The present paper investigates the use and distribution of regular and irregular tag questions in Indian English and Hong Kong English with the following objectives: a) to analyze the distribution of the construction of regular and irregular tag questions across these varieties; b) to assess their frequency across speech and writing, text types included; and c) to evaluate the sociolinguistic variation, if any. For the purpose, the Indian and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ind and ICE-HK) will be used as sources of analysis.