The truth about British tag questions

why do we use tag questions?

I bet you`ve heard about tag questions (TQs) before, haven`t you? But, apart from knowing what kind of question they are, have you actually thought about what these TQs actually do? You might think that the primary goal of the person who utters a question is to ask for some knowledge that they previously didn’t have – and you would be quite right. However, is there something more to TQs than just questions?

The thought that there might be more to questions than just a request for information has previously crossed a number of minds, some of them belonging to professional linguists. For instance, Ditte Kimps, Kristin Davidse and Bert Cornillie set out to create a typology of the basic functions of English TQs in speech. They trawled through two corpora of spoken British English – because TQs typically occur in spoken language. The corpora were the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English and the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage English.

Overall, the researchers came up with five functions that a TQ can perform. Apart from being a question i.e. a linguistic strategy for seeking information, TQs can function as:

·       a statement

·       a statement-question blend

·       a response

·       a command or an offer (e.g. a TQ can negotiate a desired action)

The criteria used in the categorization procedures were the intonation on the tag (whether the last part of the TQ is pronounced with rising or falling intonation), the polarity of the tag (for example, in he`s fine, is he? there is constant polarity, as opposed to in he`s fine, isn`t he? where there is regular polarity, meaning that the tag is negative but the preceding clause is not). The authors also considered whether the TQ was the last item preceding a response (so-called turn-final TQ) or whether the same speaker continued his or her turn in the discussion after asking a TQ (so-called turn-medial TQ).

Surprisingly enough, only 20% of all occurrences were categorized as questions. The examples include (the TQs are underlined):

B:  he says the contraction makes it quite normal, but the other doesn’t
A:  you’re sure of that, are you?

Here you see all the typical ‘textbook’ features of questions: rising intonation, expectation of a response, lack of knowledge on the part of A. Interestingly, constant polarity is more frequent in questions than in any other function types of TQ.

What about the other function types? 21% of the data consisted of TQs that were statements not usually expecting a response. As a rule, these are turn-medial and uttered with falling intonation on the tag. For example:

A: er heˈs not gonna give it to you twice, though, is he? cos, I donˈt reckon he would give it to you twice 
B:  he donˈt, he donˈt give it to you twice

The most common function (44%) of the TQs was a statement-question blend; that is, the TQ states a specific proposition, but the speaker expects a response. 88% of this type of TQ did get a response, usually confirming the proposition. The speakers usually positioned themselves as more knowledgeable, hence the statement part. A typical example of a statement-question blend is:

B:  and he makes this hideous giggle, doesn’t he? 
A:  yes, he does

Finally, a tiny (3%), but peculiar part of the data contains TQs initiating an exchange where the speaker is demanding or offering a desired action, as in this example:

you know, Pat, don’t say that, will you?

These are usually pronounced with rising intonation on the tag, which indicates uncertainty and thus softens the request that the addressee complies with the command.

So although these forms are known as tag questions, ‘question’ doesn’t seem the right word to use, does it?

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Kimps, Ditte; Davidse, Kristin; and Cornillie Bert (2014) A speech function analysis of tag questions in British English spontaneous dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 66: 64-85.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.013

This summary was written by Marina Myntsykovska

Gentlemen before ladies?

     Does word order perpetuate outdated images about women and men?                             

You probably say pots and pans, not pans and pots, and lords and ladies, not ladies and lords. Why, though? What makes us always produce one of the words in a pair first?

A previous post on this blog discussed ordering in word pairs in general (which way round?). Heiko Motschenbacher, though, argues that pairs involving personal nouns like lords and ladies need special treatment since, unlike pots and pans, pairs that refer to females and males can reflect and perpetuate power differences in society. The term that comes first in the pair is usually thought to represent the social role with the higher social ranking. This is why guidelines for non-sexist language often recommend placing the female term in first position, to symbolically reverse the traditional order.

Motschenbacher analysed 30 frequent mixed-gender word pairs in the 88 million word written part of the British National Corpus. These pairs occurred a total of 8, 156 times. In addition to general terms denoting men and women such as girl/boy, he/she, the pairs included address terms (ladies/gentlemen), nobility terms (lords/ladies), occupational terms (actor/actress) traditionally heterosexual role terms (husband/wife) and kinship terms (aunt/uncle).  She found that the order of the words in the pairs perpetuated images about the social roles of women and men that now seem outdated. Men came first in general, especially in pairs referring to professions (doctors and nurses) and the nobility. The conventional ordering in sons and daughters reflects, she claims, previous traditions of sons being more important than daughters. The ordering in word pairs related to marriage reflects traditional gender discourses: men dominate during marriage (husband and wife) but women come first when they are not yet married (bride and bridegroom), no longer married (widow and widower) or when raising children (mum and dad).

Other factors affect word order too. Just as with non-personal nouns, words with a smaller number of syllables tend to come first (hence, perhaps, ladies and gentlemen). This tendency is more common, though, when it is the male form that is shorter. The form of the word is also relevant, with less complex words occurring first (prince and princess, for example). The sex of the author had a small effect, with male authors using man and woman more often than woman and man, compared to female authors and mixed sex (co) authors. Male authors also had the highest rates of father and mother, preferring this to the more usual mother and father. The sex of the target audience also had an effect: higher female-first rates were found only in writing stereotypically targeted towards women (for example, in a book entitled The Art of Starvation).

In most cases though, the strongest factor overall was whether the word referred to a male or a female. This corresponds to research on word pairs in general, which finds that conceptually more salient semantic features prevail over other factors as far as the ordering of terms is concerned. Male-first predominance is not absolute though: as we have seen, there are some domains where females come first, reflecting traditional views about gendered social roles.

Motschenbacher does not want to make suggestions for language reform, arguing that for some pairs it would be hard to find gender-neutral alternatives and that in any case most recommendations are likely to be biased in some way. She is in favour instead of raising awareness of the fact that no linguistic choices are neutral. Individuals have the choice of shifting away from a traditional ordering that perpetuates harmful discourses about socially ‘appropriate’ roles of the two sexes; we need, therefore, to make up our minds about which messages we wish to convey. We should bear in mind, though, that putting females first is not necessarily the best way forward, since it can entrench domain-specific female stereotypes (in mother and father, for example). Word pairs that specify the two genders, she points out, are almost invariably connected to gender inequality.  

It’s much easier talking about pots and pans, isn’t it?!

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Motschenbacher, Heiko (2013) Gentlemen before ladies? A corpus-based study of conjunct order in personal binomials. Journal of English Linguistics 41 (3): 212-242.

doi. 10.1177/0075424213489993

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Who said that? Zero/null quotatives to introduce speech.

The quotative system, particularly in teenage speech, has received a lot of attention from linguists in recent years (for other summaries related to this topic click ‘Quotatives’ in the left-hand bar). Much of the research has focused on the frequency rates and the linguistic contexts in which reporting verbs such as SAY, GO and THINK are used, with many studies focusing on the more recent newcomer BE LIKE, which has emerged among English varieties across the globe.

A further competitor within the quotative system, however, is the ‘zero’ or ‘null’ quotative, which is the focus of a study by Ignacio M. Palacios Martinez. These are instances where direct speech is introduced without the use of any introductory verb or attributed speaker. Palacios Martínez provides the following example where Speaker A introduces direct speech without any introductory verb (Ø = zero quotative) but the context and the mimicking voice provide Speaker B with the clue that these are the words of the male protagonist of the film being discussed:

A:       And I’m gonna go and see Sommersby.

B:       <unclear>

A:       Sommersby with Jodie Foster and Richard Gere.

B:       Oh yeah

A:       <mimicking> Ø ‘I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you!’

Palacios Martínez compared the speech of Spanish (mainly from Madrid) and English (mainly from London) teenagers from similar social backgrounds and found that zero quotatives represented 8% and around 18% respectively of all quotatives used, demonstrating that it is a robust competitor within these quotative systems.

Furthermore, the Spanish and English teenagers were found to use zero quotatives in similar ways. The first main context identified as favoring the use of a zero quotative was when a sound or non-lexicalised word was used, as in ‘grrr, grrr, grrr’ to provide a listener with an animal sound when telling a story about a bear.

The second main use of zero quotatives was connected with mimicking a voice (as in the above example) or performing in a new voice, for example for dramatic or humorous effect. Within this category, Palacios Martinez found that the teenagers imitated a wide variety of accents, including African, Jamaican, Chinese, French and Swedish, usually done to criticize or make fun of another person or to sound funny and make their interlocutor laugh. The teenagers also emulated famous people or used voices typical of babies or young children.

An interesting use of the zero quotative was, as Palacios Martínez describes it, to express disgust and disagreement with an interlocutor. He provides an example of a girl repeating a disagreement that she had with a boy in her class about a football team, where she repeats what the boy says and what she says in return but without the overt use of an introductory verb in the case of either speaker.  The fact that conflicting views are presented seems to make it clear that different people are being represented in the narrative.

An interesting observation made by Palacios Martínez is that the more involved a narrator becomes with his/her story and as the story becomes more dramatic, the more likely is the use of explicit quotatives to be abandoned and zero quotatives used. This is perhaps also connected to the fact that as a story progresses the listener comes to know the characters involved and there is not such a need for overt dialogue introducers.

To conclude, Palacios Martínez argues that zero quotatives play an important role in the speech of teenagers, particularly in the construction of their narratives, suggesting that this may be connected to the fact that teenagers are more prone to imitating and mimicking others than adults. He argues that the lack of overt quotatives serves to make the narrative account more fluid and thus also involves the interlocutor more directly.

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Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M. (2013). Zero quoting in the speech of British and Spanish teenagers. A contrastive corpus-based study. Discourse Studies 15(4): 439-462.

DOI: 10.1177/1461445613482431

This summary was written by Sue Fox

The pen is mightier than the javelin?

safe and secure Olympic Games?

Summer Olympic Games have been called ‘sport mega-events’ due to their huge scale.  They take place in large capital cities and are generally considered as immensely important occasions, for which massive security operations are mounted. Malcolm N. MacDonald and Duncan Hunter were interested in investigating the language used to describe the security operation surrounding the London 2012 Games and to do this they considered the distinctive linguistic features used in Olympic security documents.

They analysed 176 online documents from 11 UK institutes involved in the security for the 2012 Games.  They found that the Games were made to seem exceptional through certain linguistic devices.  For example, superlative adjectives were often used to stress just how important and unique the Games were:

The London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will be the largest sporting event in UK history … It will involve the biggest peacetime security operation ever undertaken in the UK.

These adjectives give a very definite idea of sheer size and scale.  As well as this, they found that a recurrent theme in the texts was the impact the Games would have on different security sectors, such as

 The Olympics are the biggest peacetime operation … there will be an impact on policing during 2012’

The phrase ‘safety and security’ was found to be used 132 times in just 12 texts. It seems to be used emblematically to suggest the main goal of the security operation.  For example:

The Government has made safety and security at the Games a top priority …

The phrase occurs 254 times in the texts and is often found with other words such as strategy, programme, delivery and operation, as evidenced in the following example:

 … delivery of Games safety and security compatible with the broader Games operation.

It is also used in its adjectival form ‘safe and secure’, usually in front of the word ‘Games’.  The researchers surmised that the phrase is deliberately used to join the positive connotations of ‘safety’ with the more problematic concept of ‘security’, making ‘security’ in turn seem more positive.  The phrase was used so often in the texts analysed, almost repetitively at times, that as well as stressing the necessity of the conjoined concepts, they also appeared as ‘real’ rather than as abstract concepts.

In the texts, prospective visitors to the Games were often addressed directly in the second person (you) and presented in a passive position, as just seeing things, whilst the security agents were much more ‘active’:

 … you will see security measures at and around the venues … We will use familiar methods that are proven to work … you will see …security guards … who will all have a role in security at the Games

Visitors are often ordered to do things in the texts, being addressed with imperative verb forms as in

Aim to arrive at the Olympic Park around two hours before… and Make sure you’re in your seat at least 30 minutes before… They are generally spoken of as being somehow controlled. 

The texts use the noun threat very frequently, often along with the noun terrorist, as in The greatest threat to the security of the 2012 Olympic Games is terrorism.  Interestingly, although all the texts incite the fear of a threat, this is never actually attributed to a particular person or group of people.  Instead, it is closely linked with the abstract notion of ‘terrorism’ in general.

MacDonald and Hunter feel that there is a political agenda behind the use of language in the texts that they studied.  Between 2001 and 2011 Europe and USA experienced five major terrorist attacks. In consequence many documents have been written which, although they are designed to allay the fear of a terrorist attack, actually do the opposite by making the reader feel powerless before this supposed ‘threat’ to an event that is presented as exceptionally important.  In the researchers’ eyes, this provides an excuse to mount huge security operations in whichever major city may be hosting the sporting event.  They conclude that such undemocratic, almost dictator–like behaviour, revealed through language use, is actually anti-democratic and ironically goes against the inclusive nature of the Olympic spirit.

So maybe whoever said ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was right?
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MacDonald, Malcolm N. and Hunter, Duncan (2013) The discourse of Olympic security: London 2012.  Discourse and Society 24 (1): 66-88.

doi.  10.1177/0957926512474148

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

‘Throve’ and ‘dove’ or ‘thrived’ and ‘dived’? Let’s call the whole thing off!

At first, trying to explain the formation of the past tense in English may seem simple – you just add –-ed, don’t you? So that walk becomes walked and help becomes helped, right?  Correct! ... for ‘regular’ verbs.  Unfortunately, there are also many ‘irregular’ verbs like eat (ate) and stand (stood) that do not easily fit into this pattern.  In a logical world, we would expect language to regularize over time and this is true of some verbs – helped was hulpon in Old English. However, some regular past tense forms have actually become irregular – for example, mean > meant.

Lieselotte Anderwald investigated this phenomenon in British and American English.  These two varieties have developed their own national features and peculiarities over time and Anderwald was curious to see if this had happened with irregular past tense forms.  She concentrated on three verbs which have been recorded in both regular and irregular forms.  These are throve vs. thrived, dove vs. dived and plead vs. pled.  She searched a digital database or ‘corpus’ of 400 million American English words called Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find occurrences of these irregular past tense forms from as far back as 1810. She also searched the British National Corpus (BNC), containing over 100 million words from British English so that she could compare her findings. Then, she consulted her own Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG), containing 258 British and North American Grammar Books published during the 19^th century, to see if linguists were recommending a particular usage of these verb forms.

Although throve was the main past tense form used during the nineteeth century, it declined rapidly in use from 1910 onwards and seems to have regularized so that American users now only use thrived.  However, British English still uses throve at times.  American English appears to be leading British English by several decades in this regularization process.  In a completely opposite way, the irregular form dove is becoming more irregular in American English.  In fact, dove is used as much as dived in modern American usage today (50% of the time), unlike in British English where it is used just 1% of the time. The irregular form pled also seems to be a new form which has emerged during the twentieth century in American English, although in both varieties it is used very infrequently and mainly in legal contexts.

With this data in mind, Anderwald consulted the CNG.  In the case of thrived vs. throve the American  nineteenth century grammars permitted a lot of variation in usage and started to endorse thrived from the middle of the century, whereas the British Grammars appeared to strongly favour the use of throve. It is hard to know whether these American Grammars were just describing what they observed happening to this verb form or whether their recommendations were in some way influential in the change actually taking place.  Dove was rarely acknowledged as an irregular verb in any of the grammars consulted and dived was the only form accepted.  This is interesting considering how widely used it now is in American English and its lack of acknowledgment in grammars does not seem to have influenced the emergence of this irregular form.  Pled was only mentioned in twelve grammar books, ten of them from America and just two from Britain.  There was a rise in its inclusion in verb tables in  grammars of the 1860s, so that children would have learnt plead-pled-pled by heart.  Looking at her data from COHA, Anderwald noticed that there was a small rise in usage of pled in the 1870s which may have been caused by the generation of 1860 using it in their adult writing: a very small example of prescriptive influence maybe?  If this is so, it is probably because plead was (and is) so infrequent that users needed to consult a grammar book, whereas a more frequently used word is much better entrenched in the memory and therefore perhaps less influenced by grammarians. 

The differences Anderwald found between these changing irregular forms shows how two varieties of the same language can grow, develop and change in different ways. This is what makes language an integral part of a national character and grammarians may only minimally affect this.  Language will develop in its own way and won’t be restrained by rules…in fact sometimes it will even break them – obviously what throve throve to do!

Anderwald, Lieselotte (2013) Natural language change or prescriptive influence? Throve, dove, pled, drug and snuck in 19th-century American English. English World-Wide 34:2 (2013), 146–176.

doi 10.1075/eww.34.2.02

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle