Another American/British English question from the woman who's obsessed with them.
A paper by Gunnel Tottie and Sebastian Hoffmann used a corpus methodology to find that the British use NINE TIMES more tag questions than Americans. BUT they only studied canonical tag questions. I have my suspicions that the story might've been quite different if they'd looked at non-canonical ones.
Canonical tag questions have an auxiliary or modal verb that is in the opposite polairty (i.e. affirmative or negative) to the main clause, plus a pronoun that co-refers with the subject of the main clause. So:
So, if we take those kinds of things into account, do the British really use more tag questions than Americans? Do they use the same non-canonical tags? Do they use them for the same purposes?
A paper by Gunnel Tottie and Sebastian Hoffmann used a corpus methodology to find that the British use NINE TIMES more tag questions than Americans. BUT they only studied canonical tag questions. I have my suspicions that the story might've been quite different if they'd looked at non-canonical ones.
Canonical tag questions have an auxiliary or modal verb that is in the opposite polairty (i.e. affirmative or negative) to the main clause, plus a pronoun that co-refers with the subject of the main clause. So:
You've cut your hair, haven't you? [affirmative clause + negative tag]Non-canonical ones would be things like:
You don't like broccoli, do you? [negative clause + affirmative tag]
He's a loser, innit?And other things like that where the tag is there to kind of ask the hearer to confirm what's been said. (I say 'kind of' because the purpose might not be quite that straightforward.)
You're taking semantics, right?
The weather is great, eh?
So, if we take those kinds of things into account, do the British really use more tag questions than Americans? Do they use the same non-canonical tags? Do they use them for the same purposes?
