Tag Questions in Conversation
Subtitle: A Typology of Their Interactional and Stance Meanings
Publisher: Benjamins Publishing Company, John
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9789027264336
Subjects: English language, spoken english; English language, intonation; English language, sentences
Description: "This monograph deals with variable tag questions. These are utterances with a variable interrogative tag, like It's peculiar writing, isn't it, and the semi-variable tag innit, such as Nice, innit. The aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions. Compared to existing descriptions, the proposed typology is novel in three ways. Firstly, whereas almost all existing typologies are single-layered classifications, the functions of tag questions are categorized into two parallel dimensions of interpersonal meaning: the speech function and the stance layer. Secondly, semantic generalizations are proposed for clusters of grammatical, intonational and conversational properties. Thirdly, the bottom-up description is based on a sizeable amount of authentic, spontaneous conversations, which are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively"--