Tag questions across Irish English and British English: A corpus analysis of form and function

Abstract

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

Question Tags in Philippine English

“…Despite this methodological problem, the analysis has highlighted that the strong focus on private dialogues in previous research on QTs (e.g. Axelsson 2018; Barron et al 2015;Columbus 2009Columbus , 2010Kimps 2018) only provides a limited view on QT usage. There is a need of research on QTs and other pragmatic phenomena in a wider range of text types to highlight contextualized patterns of use (see also Barron 2015: 224-225).…”

“…The form-function relationship has so far only been analyzed for variant QTs (e.g. Barron 2015;Barron et al 2015;Borlongan 2008;Kimps 2018) or for variant in contrast to all invariant QTs (González 2018). However, this study has shown that invariant QTs are functionally very diverse and cannot be treated as one homogenous group: they are not chosen randomly but there are fine-grained differences in their functions that influence the selection.…”

“…(4) <#>Claude Van Damme movies are considered A films right (S1B-037) (5) <#>Well it's not just about Manila you know (S1A-096) (6) <#>You guys kind of agree uh (S1B-035) (7) <#>Did you see it di ba (S1A-004) Most previous corpus-based research on QTs has focused on variant ones with a strong focus on their exact formal realization. For example, Tottie and Hoffmann (2006) compare British and American English using the BNC and the Longman Spoken American Corpus, Barron et al (2015) study variant QTs in ICE-GB and ICE-Ireland, Axelsson (2018) analyzes variant QTs in the BNC2014, and Kimps (2018) investigates their use in ICE-GB, the London Lund Corpus, and the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. Beyond this wide body of research on English varieties spoken as a native language (ENL), several studies have also investigated variant QTs in countries where English functions as a second language (ESL) as is the case in the Philippines.…”

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

“…As well as differences relating to which clause is the anchor, another variable is the mood of the anchor. Studies including Holmes (1982), Kimps et al (2014) and Barron et al (2015) have explored the issue of anchor mood with respect to question tags, which have been shown to be compatible with declarative, interrogative, exclamative and imperative anchors. While the same is true of the ProTag construction in relation to the first three, the matter is not straightforward when we come to consider imperatives as anchors.…”

Developments in the spoken component of ICE corpora

“…SPICE‐Ireland does not distinguish among the different functions of utterance tags (for a study of those data, see Barron , Barron et al. as well as Kallen & Kirk : 54–58, 110–115). Quotatives are marked in two stages: the quotative verb or particle is suffixed with a plus symbol + and the actual quoted words are inserted within a pair of COCOA‐style angle brackets: <quote> … </quote>.…”