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

Why passives should not be shunned

hmm…. can a passive be said to be sneaky?

Scanning the pages of endless style guides, Geoffrey Pullum was startled at the amount of ruthless criticism devoted to the passive voice. Authors, journalists and writing tutors continuously discourage the use of the passive in writing, describing it as evasive, and somehow linking it to a lack of responsibility. But not only do these critics lack a coherent definition of the passive, they also seem to do little to justify their position.  So the researcher set out to thoroughly describe the passive from a syntactic perspective. He cuts the language mavens' arguments to ribbons.

Passives come in all sorts, from the canonical The president’s authority has been much diminished to Marie got photographed by a journalist. Contrary to popular belief, passives may specify the agent very clearly, usually by means of a ­by-phrase, as in It was thrown at them by hooligans – where we know exactly who is responsible for the action. Now and then passives occur without be or a past participle, for instance, That said, however, Korea is Korea, not the Philippines. 

Pullum identified four kinds of criticisms in relation to passives. They are alleged to be

·      sneaky or evasive

·      avoided by good writers

·      dull and static

·      weak

Item number one refers to the vagueness of responsibility. As Sherry Roberts  put it:

A sentence written in passive voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town.[1]

There are two ways of dealing with this criticism. First, in some cases the agent cannot or need not be specified at all. It can be irrelevant or unknowable, as the two sentences below demonstrate:

When the patient was first diagnosed with cancer her symptoms were minor.

Perhaps the mysterious mound was constructed as a memorial.

Second, a so-called long passive (with a ­by-phrase) can be an effective device to emphasize agency, as it gives details of the agent.

Another supposed fault of the passive is that they are omitted by good authors. In his essay Politics and the English language George Orwell, a celebrated writer, warned: ‘Never use the passive where you can use the active’[2]. Yet in the very piece of writing containing this advice, 20 % of the transitive verbs are passives! An average writer passivises only about 13% of verbs, which means that, in fact, Mr. Orwell resorted to this construction rather frequently.

As regards the two other criticisms, weakness and dullness, these are much more dependent on the content of the text, rather than on a specific syntactic construction.

To sum up, the holy war against the passive voice, launched by style guide authors and writing tutors since the early 20^th century, has little to do with the passive as such. When used appropriately, it can be as dynamic, powerful and accurate as any other form of language. The key question is to use it wisely and appropriately.

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[1] http://www.editorialservice.com/writing-and-editing/11ways.html#7, in Section 7, ‘Be Active’

[2] Orwell, G., 1946. Politics and the English language. Horizon, 252–264

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Geoffrey K. Pullum (2014) Fear and loathing of the English passive. Language and Communication 37: 60-74.

doi. http://dx/doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom2013.08.009 

This summary was written by Maryna Myntsykovska

It's her personality man's looking at

I don't mind how my girl looks.. it's her personality man's looking at 

London English has a new pronoun. Young people living in multicultural areas of the inner city use man as an alternative to I. Sometimes the meaning could be indefinite: in the caption to the picture Alex’ man pronoun could perhaps be replaced by you (in its general sense of ‘anyone’) or even one; but in other examples, like (1) below, man refers quite unambiguously to the speaker. Here Alex is telling his friend what he’d said to his girlfriend, who had annoyed him by bringing along her friends when he had arranged to meet her.

(1) didn’t I tell you man wanna come see you  . I don’t date your friends I date you (Alex)

How has this new pronoun developed? One relevant factor is that young people in multicultural areas of London now use man as a plural noun as well as a singular noun. Look, for example, at (2) and (3), where the number thirty-six and the adjective bare, ‘many’, show clearly that the noun is plural.

(2) what am I doing with over thirty-six man chasing me blud (Alex)

(3) and I ended up hanging around with bare bare man (Roshan)

Man is not the only new plural form of the noun: mens, mans and mandem are also heard in London, as well as the expected men. Mandem seems a straightforward borrowing from Jamaican Creole. The other forms result from the way that children acquire English in linguistically diverse inner city areas – in an unguided, informal fashion, in their friendship groups.  Many different varieties of English are used in these groups, resulting in much linguistic variation and linguistic flexibility (click on ‘Multicultural London English’ in the list of terms on the left to see our other posts on this new variety of English).

As a plural noun, man always refers to a group of individuals: either to people who are there with the speaker (e.g. you man are all batty boys, said by a young speaker to his friends) or to a group of people that the speaker has just been talking about. This paves the way for the development of the pronoun, since this is exactly how pronouns are used: I refers to a person who is there (the speaker), while he or she refer either to another person who is there or to a person the speaker has just mentioned. Since the plural noun man refers to a group of people, speakers can present themselves as symbolically belonging to that group. So when Alex uses man to refer to himself, as in the caption to the picture, he presents himself as a member of the group of people who think that personality is more important than looks. This gives his opinion more authority, by implying that there are others who feel the same way he does. In the same way, in (1), above, Alex refers to himself as man and by doing so portrays himself as one of a group of like-minded people who would also feel this way.

Another factor that helps explain the emergence of man as a pronoun is that the discourse-pragmatic form man is very frequent indeed in multicultural inner city London. Like other discourse markers, man has many functions, but the chief one seems to be to express emotion (as in (4)) and to construct solidarity between speakers.

(4) aah man that’s long that’s kind of long (Roshan)

Because man is used so often this way, the connotations of solidarity may spread over into its other uses – including the new use as a pronoun. So, in (5), below, Dexter is telling his friends how upset he was at not being able to use the plane ticket he had bought, because the police had arrested him. He uses you know to involve the other speakers, reinforces the fact that he had paid for the ticket himself by saying paid for my own ticket (rather than simply I’d bought a ticket), highlights the amount of money (a big three hundred and fifty pounds) and says explicitly that he was so upset. Here, using man to refer to himself is just one of many ways to emphasise the experience and look for solidarity and support from the listeners.

(5) before I got arrested man paid for my own ticket to go Jamaica you know . but I’ve never paid to go on no holiday before this time  I paid... a big three hundred and fifty pound .. I was so upset (Dexter)

In the data analysed in this paper it is almost exclusively male speakers who use the new pronoun, suggesting that it retains the meaning of the noun man. It has not yet, then, become a fully-fledged pronoun like I: only when both male and females refer to themselves as man will this have happened.

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Cheshire, Jenny (2013) Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (5): 608-633.

doi. 10.1111/josl.12053

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire