The prosody of question tags in English

Abstract

The prosodic realization of English question tags (QTs) has received some interest in the literature; yet corpus studies on the factors affecting their phrasing and intonational realization are very rare or limited to a certain aspect. This article presents a quantitative corpus study of 370 QTs from the International Corpus of English that were annotated for prosodic phrasing and intonational realization of the QT and the host. Factors tested were polarity, position in the sentence and the turn as well as verb type. Generally, prosodic phrasing and intonational realization were highly correlated: separate QTs were mostly realized with a falling contour, while integrated QTs were mostly rising. Results from regression models showed a strong effect of polarity: QTs with an opposite polarity were more often phrased separately compared to QTs with constant polarity, but the phrasing of opposite polarity QTs was further dependent on whether the QT was negative or positive (more separate phrasing in negative QTs). Furthermore, prosodic separation was more frequent at the end of syntactic phrases and clauses compared to phrase-medial QTs. At the end of a turn, speakers realized more rising contours compared to QTs within a speaker's turn. Verb type also had an effect on the phrasing of the tag. Taken together, our results confirm some of the claims previously held for QTs, while others are modified and new findings are added.

A corpus-based analysis of meaning variations in German tag questions Evidence from spoken and written conversational corpora

“…Most work has focused on English variant and invariant tags (i.a. Cattell 1973;Ladd 1981;Holmes 1984;Tottie and Hoffmann 2006;Kimps 2007;Kim and Ann 2008;Moore and Podesva 2009;Dehé and Braun 2013;Takahashi 2014;Malamud and Stephenson 2015;Pichler 2016). In this section, we look at existing research on TQs in order to identify relevant context distinctions that may help us differentiate the types of the German tags under consideration.…”