The present study, situated in the area of variational pragmatics, contrasts tag question (TQ) use in Ireland and Great Britain using spoken data from the Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Analysis is on the formal and functional level and also investigates formfunctional relationships. Findings reveal many similarities in the use of TQs across the varieties. They also point, however, to a lower use of TQs in Irish English and in a range of variety-preferential features on both the formal and functional levels. The paper shows how an in-depth analysis of form-function relations together with a fine-tuned investigation of sub-functions gives an insight into formal preferences. Multilingua 2015; 34(4): 495-525 Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM Systematic contrastive analyses of TQs involving IrE and further Inner or Outer Circle varieties are lacking, as are systematic analyses of TQs confined to IrE itself. Indeed, the study of TQs in IrE is a very young endeavour. The majority of analyses focus on the level of form only (cf. Hickey 2007 and Hickey 2008; Kallen and Kirk 2012;Lucek 2011). Barron (forthcoming a), an analysis of TQ form and function in a specialised corpus of retail service-encounters, is an exception. Existing studies have reported reversed polarity between anchor and tag to be most frequent in IrE (cf. Barron forthcoming a; Hickey 2008: 242), a finding which is also reflected in BrE and AmE (cf. Tottie and Hoffmann 2006). However, Barron (forthcoming a), a study of a retail corpus of IrE, also finds positive constant polarity TQs to be particularly common relative to reference corpora of BrE and AmE. In addition, this study reports a comparatively high use of interrogative anchor constructions in IrE relative to BrE and AmE. Finally, on the level of function, Barron (forthcoming a) finds the confirmation-eliciting function (functionally equivalent to questions in the present analysis) to be the most frequent TQ function in the IrE retail corpus. However, in the absence of functional analyses of general corpora of IrE, she calls for further research to 496 Anne Barron et al. Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM 498 Anne Barron et al. Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM1 Other invariant tags, which are not discussed in this study, include single-word tags such as right, and okay, phonological sequences, such as eh and huh, and fixed phrases containing lexical material, such as (do) you know/see and I think. The tag innit? -the coalesced form of isn't it? -is also excluded. Tag questions across Irish English and British English 499 Brought to you by | University of Michigan Authenticated Download Date | 7/1/15 4:02 AM