Right-dislocated pronouns in British English: the form and functions of ProTag constructions

Abstract

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.

Lone pronoun tags in Early Modern English: ProTag constructions in the dramas of Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare

“…Such editorial uncertainty, possibly related to the editors' lack of familiarity with ProTag constructions, shows that the ambiguity remains unresolved, and they ultimately defer the responsibility of interpretation from the editor to the reader. We have therefore considered each of the ambiguous I/aye examples in their dramatic contexts, and retained those that exhibit the features of ProTags consistent with the fundamental insights in Mycock (2019) but to be defined specifically for EModE in section 4. We hope that the new context offered by this research may help inform future editors' decisions regarding this particular ambiguity.…”

“…Prior to Mycock (2019), the ProTag construction 3 in English had been the subject of sociolinguistic research (for example, Snell 2008, Moore & Snell 2011 and received brief mention in some grammars of varieties of British English (for example, Biber et al 1999, Shorrocks 1999, but systematic investigation of its form and functions was lacking. The history of this construction has received even less attention, with the result being that what is known about the existence of ProTags and their features in earlier varieties is limited and partial.…”

“…In this article, we set out for the first time the defining characteristics of the ProTag construction in EModE and then compare it to its counterpart in PDBE in order to determine the extent to which they differ, and hence how the construction has changed over this period. We begin with a review of Mycock's (2019) findings in relation to PDBE in order to introduce what is likely to be an unfamiliar construction and to highlight those features of it which may be subject to variation and therefore must be considered in any research on it, including this study of ProTags in EModE. 3 We use the term 'construction' in its general sense.…”

“…There is no evidence that the anchor can be imperative in PDBE. Mycock (2019) excludes from consideration examples of the type You little raver, you (BNC-BP7/1552) because they have been classified as a distinct type of construction. Biber et al (1999) state they are exclamatives that superficially resemble vocatives, while Corver (2008) assigns the anchor in such examples to the category evaluative vocative.…”

“…In section 2, we provide an introduction to the ProTag construction by reviewing its form and functions in PDBE according to the most comprehensive work on this topic to date; viz. Mycock (2019). After describing our corpus and outlining our methodology (section 3), we begin by determining the formal properties of this construction and its functions in EModE (section 4).…”