20 April 2016

Ditte Kimps (KU Leuven)

English variable tag questions: a typology of their interpersonal meanings

This presentation will focus on the main findings of my PhD dissertation. Its aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions (TQs) as found in spontaneous talk-in-interaction. The dataset consists of TQs with both variable tags (1) and the semi-variable innit (2). The TQs have been extracted from the spoken British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), as well as from the prosodically transcribed parts of the Corpus of London Teenage Language and the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.
(1) it’s a flat, isn’t it (ICE-GB)
(2) It’s dead, innit (COLT)
My typology follows the functional linguistic tradition of distinguishing interactional meanings from stance meanings (cf. McGregor 1997:222-245, Simon-Vandenbergen & Aijmer 2007:301) and distinguishes between two dimensions of interpersonal meaning: (i) speech function and (ii) rhetorical modification. (i) As for the speech functions, tags indicate which interactional position the speaker assumes in the dialogue and which response s/he expects from the hearer. (ii) With regard to the rhetorical modification, it is important to take into account that tags “modify the way in which the anchor relates to presuppositions, expectations, and attitudes of speaker and hearer” (McGregor 1997:222-233). I have reconceptualized the latter dimension as being concerned with the negotiation and construction of common ground. Each dimension leads to a distinct layer of analysis, i.e. a speech function layer and a common ground layer, in which I will identify the main subtypes.
The main subtypes are characterized as preferred correlations between values of response-orientation and rhetorical modification; these correlations are the outcome of a quantitative analysis of spontaneous dialogue data. The analysis systematically refers to the formal coding means of these interpersonal meanings: mood, modality and polarity of stem and tag, position in the turn, part in the adjacency pair, and intonation.
The proposed typology is novel in two ways: (1) it makes a clear distinction between the two dimensions of interpersonal meanings, while previous functional models are often a mixture of elements of the two (see for example Millar & Brown 1979, Holmes 1983, Algeo 1990, Stenström et al 2001, Tottie & Hoffmann 2006), and (2) it incorporates grammatical, conversational and prosodic TQ features into the functional analysis, while earlier research focussed only on subsets of these.

References
Algeo, John, 1990. It’s a myth, innit? Politeness and the English tag questions. In: Ricks, C., Michaels, L. (eds.), The State of the Language. Berkeley: Centennial Books, University of California Press, 443-450.
Holmes, Janet, 1983. The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal 3, 40-65.
McGregor, William, 1997. Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.
Miller, Martin, Brown, Keith, 1979. Tag questions in Edinburgh speech. Linguistische Berichte Braunschweig 60, 24-45.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, Aijmer, Karin, 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty. A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Andersen, Gisle, Hasund, Ingrid, Kristine, 2002. Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 8. Benjamins.
Tottie, Gunnel, Hoffmann, Sebastian, 2006. Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics 34, 283-311.

Ditte Kimps obtained her MA in Language and Literature: Germanic Languages (English and Dutch) from the University of Leuven in September 2003. She also holds the degree of Complementary Studies Master in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Leuven, 2004). From October 2004 until September 2005, she was appointed as a researcher to the projects Categorization and instantiation in the nominal group: a functional approach to the English nominal group and A functional, lexicogrammatical approach to the English nominal group. From October 2005 until March 2011, she worked as computer linguist for the speech technology companies Dictaphone and Nuance. Her main task was to create and maintain speech recognition lexicons for various languages. She is currently very near completion of a PhD about tag questions in spontaneous dialogue.