A comparative analysis of invariant tags in three varieties of English

Abstract

Discourse markers are a feature of everyday conversation — they signal attitudes and beliefs to their interlocutors beyond the base utterance. One particular type of discourse marker is the invariant tag (InT), for example New Zealand and Canadian Englisheh. Previous studies of InTs have clearly described InT uses in one language variety (e.g. Berland 1997, on London teenage talk; Stubbe and Holmes 1995, on NZ English; on sociolinguistic features e.g. Stubbe and Holmes 1995 and on single markers e.g. Avis 1972; Love 1973; Gibson 1977; Meyerhoff 1992 and 1994; Gold 2005, 2008 oneh). However, the class of InTs has not yet been fully described, and the variety of approaches taken (corpus- and survey-based) does not easily allow for cross-varietal or cross-linguistic comparison. This study investigates InTs in three varieties of English from a corpus-based approach. It lists the InTs available in New Zealand, British and Indian English through their occurrences in their respective International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, and compares usages of four tags across the varieties. The description offers a clearer overview of the InT class for descriptive grammars, as well as more explicit definitions and usage guides for e.g. EFL/ESL pedagogy. An unambiguous description of several InTs and their meanings will also allow more thorough comparison in studies of other English varieties. Finally, the results offer another viewpoint on the issue of representativeness in corpora with respect to regional versus national varieties of the Englishes.

Italian tag questions and their conversational functions

“…This function, often cited as one of the canonical functions of TQs (e.g., Huddleston and Pullum, 2002;Columbus, 2010), is comparable to Algeo's (1990) informational TQ, and has also been identified by Bazzanella (1994) …”

“…One can test whether a word or phrase is a tag by substituting different tags for it and checking whether any meaning is lost. A similar test was proposed by Columbus (2010) for invariant TQs in English, following Fuller's (2003) claim that the semantic relationship between elements in the utterance should remain unchanged if the tag is removed. In Excerpt 10, the tag no is used in final position to confirm information.…”

“…In a comparison of invariant tags in British, New Zealand and Indian English, Columbus (2010) identifies 17 pragmatic functions of tags, which can be divided into five macro-categories, though the extent of their use differs across the three varieties studied. Columbus's work includes tags with non-question uses, and as a result, some of her categories extend beyond those identified for TQs in the literature.…”

“…As noted above, most pragmatic classifications of TQs that rely on significant samples of empirical data have focused on English. Furthermore, with some exceptions (e.g., Cuenca, 1997;Stenström et al, 2002;Columbus, 2010;Mithun, 2012) the majority of such classifications has focused on variant TQs. The primary aim of this paper is to investigate (invariant) TQ use in Italian based on a large dataset, arriving at a classification that is compared to others proposed for English and other languages.…”

The invariant tag isn't it in Asian Englishes

“…Trudgill and Hannah (1985: 111; see also Nihalani et al : 104) have noted that speakers of IndE use the tag isn't it as an invariant question marker, while Balasubramanian (), Columbus () and Lange () have also conducted quantitative analyses of the use of this feature in the variety. It is not, however, a feature that is unique to IndE: Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004: 1147, 1192) have noted that invariant tags such as isn't it are used frequently in many L2 varieties of English.…”