Tags are widely acknowledged as being an important feature of colloquial British English. In this article, I examine a type of tag that has to date received little attention in the literature beyond sociolinguistic research into its interpersonal functions: right-dislocated lone pronouns, or ProTags. Biber et al. (1999) acknowledge that the demonstrative pronoun that can be used as a right-dislocated tag in conversational British English, but corpus data reveal that other pronouns can also be used as ProTags.Based on a range of examples, primarily taken from large-scale corpora, I examine the form of the ProTag construction and its functions, comparing it with other tags used in British English, particularly question tags. In common with other tags, ProTags are a classic case of language conveying more than straightforward propositional content. I consider to what extent proposed analyses of the functions of tag questions carry over to ProTags, and briefly whether this construction has been a feature of British English for longer than might at first be assumed.

This is the most comprehensive reference work on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), which will be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academics, and researchers in linguistics and in related fields. Covering the analysis of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, and information structure, and how these aspects of linguistic structure interact in the nontransformational framework of LFG, this book will appeal to readers working in a variety of sub-fields, including researchers involved in the description and documentation of languages, whose work continues to be an important part of the LFG literature The book consists of three parts. The first part examines the syntactic theory and formal architecture of LFG, with detailed explanation and comprehensive illustration, providing an unparalleled introduction to the fundamentals of the theory. The second part of the book explores nonsyntactic levels of linguistic structure, including the syntax-semantics interface and semantic representation, argument structure, information structure, prosodic structure, and morphological structure, and how these are related in the projection architecture of LFG. The third part of the book illustrates the theory more explicitly by presenting explorations of the syntax and semantics of a range of representative linguistic phenomena: modification, anaphora, control, coordination, and long-distance dependencies. The final chapter discusses LFG-based work not covered elsewhere in the book, as well as new developments in the theory.

An element can be emphasised by occupying a specific syntactic position or by bearing an appropriate intonational contour. Determining how these two types of prominence signalling and the information they encode are related raises a number of important issues concerning the interaction of syntax, prosody and meaning. A language such as Hungarian, in which discourse functions and different kinds of semantic operator are associated with certain syntactic positions, provides data that enable the connection between prosody, syntax, information structure and semantics to be investigated. Analysis of elicited spoken data reveals that (i) syntactic focus and prosodic prominence do not always align in Hungarian, and (ii) the location of prosodic prominence is determined by semantics, specifically scope, but relative scope is not computed on the basis of prosody alone. I seek to address weaknesses identified in a previous formalisation by capturing the relevant generalisations within a constraint‐based, parallel grammatical architecture.

All languages have strategies which enable speakers to ask constituent (‘wh’‐) questions. Of the strategies available, three types based on the notion of movement are usually cited in the literature: in situ, multiple fronting, and simple fronting. However, data reveal that focusing is the defining characteristic of constituent question formation cross‐linguistically. This paper therefore adopts a different approach, presenting a unified analysis within the non‐derivational framework of Lexical‐Functional Grammar which captures the relevant generalisations about focusing and in turn provides a fresh perspective on the typology of constituent question formation strategies.1

Recent research into right-dislocated pronouns has provided details of the form and functions of lone pronoun tag (ProTag) constructions in Present-day British English. In this article, we present the first systematic investigation of ProTag constructions in an earlier variety, Early Modern English. Using as our corpus the dramatic works of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare – writers already known to make use of tag questions in their works – we identified and analysed ProTag constructions. Our findings reveal that ProTag constructions in Early Modern English differ from their Present-day British English equivalents with respect to possible functions: in the earlier variety ProTag constructions could have a ‘Question’ function, the same as tag questions. We also found the relative frequency of demonstrative ProTags compared to personal ProTags to be significantly different: personal ProTags are far more frequently attested than demonstrative ProTags in our corpus of Early Modern English drama texts; this is the reverse of what has been found for Present-day British English. We propose that a key factor in the observed change is extension of the types of referents that demonstrative ProTags can have. This study offers a new perspective on ProTag constructions, their classification and development.