The Assertive Clause Hypothesis, Performative Sentences and the Adjacency Condition on Question Tags

Abstract

This article is a continuation of my recent work (Achiri-Taboh, 2015) in which I have examined isn't it? as a generalized invariant tag (GIT) used throughout the inflectional paradigm of question tags appended to declarative anchor clauses in different spoken varieties of English around the world. In that work, it is argued from a generative point of view that the source of the GIT is a truncated assertive matrix (TAM) clause in which the actually uttered anchor clause is embedded. In the present study, I explore this Assertive Clause Hypothesis (ACH) in two main ways. First, I look at the implication of the TAM clause for another such matrix clause, namely, the performative matrix clause of John Austin (1962) that has been explored within the framework of Generative Semantics initiated by John Ross in (1970). Then, to further show how the GIT actually connects with the TAM clause, the Adjacency Condition on Question Tags (ACQT) is established with the implication that restrictive tags, as opposed to the GIT, cannot be appended to a compound declarative with the view of questioning the holistic idea asserted in the latter.