This study investigates the use of tag questions (TQs) in British English fiction dialogue by mak... more This study investigates the use of tag questions (TQs) in British English fiction dialogue by making comparisons to spoken conversation. Data has been retrieved from two subcorpora of the British National Corpus (BNC): a Fiction Subcorpus and the demographic part of the spo-ken component. More than 2,500 TQs have been analysed for their formal features and more than 600 TQs also for their pragmatic functions.
The results show that declarative tag questions (DecTQs) are underrepresented in fiction dia-logue, whereas imperative tag questions (ImpTQs) are overrepresented. Moreover, several dif-ferences between the formal features and pragmatic functions of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conversation have been reported.
In fiction, reporting clauses and comments in the narrative provide the reader with informa-tion the author believes the reader needs to interpret the dialogue in the way the author has in-tended; hence, fiction dialogue is enriched with information which is useful in the analysis of a linguistic phenomenon such as the TQ.
For the functional analysis of TQs, a hierarchical model has been developed and applied. Most DecTQs turn out to be used rhetorically; only a minority are response-eliciting and, in fiction dialogue, a small number also exchange goods and services. The functional patterns for DecTQs are quite different in the two subcorpora. Most rhetorical DecTQs are addressee-ori-ented in fiction dialogue, but speaker-centred in spoken conversation. Among the response-eliciting DecTQs, there are similar proportions of confirmation-seeking DecTQs, but, in fiction dialogue, there are proportionately more confirmation-demanding DecTQs, and also a few con-versation-initiating DecTQs. All ImpTQs exchange goods and services; in fiction dialogue, there is a higher proportion of ImpTQs used as commands, and a lower proportion of ImpTQs providing advice.
The distinctive functional patterns for TQs in fiction dialogue seem largely due to the de-piction of problems, conflicts and confrontations and an avoidance of conversations on trivial matters. In fiction dialogue, authors utilize the full potential of DecTQs, which results in large formal and functional variation, whereas they tend to prefer the most conventional form of Imp-TQs. Differences between the functional patterns of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conver-sation may partly explain the differences in frequencies and formal features.
Keywords: tag questions, fiction dialogue, direct speech, spoken conversation, pragmatics, cor-pus-based study, BNC, British English
Subjectivity and epistemicity: corpus, discourse, and literary approaches to stance (ed. by Dylan Glynn and Mette Sjölin). Lund Studies in English 117., 2014
This paper deals with tag questions to which an answer is demanded by a speaker who is certain ab... more This paper deals with tag questions to which an answer is demanded by a speaker who is certain about the truth of the proposition but who wants to hear the answer uttered by the addressee. Similar tag questions have previously been described based on data from courtrooms (e.g. Biscetti 2006), where tag questions are typically used by powerful speakers. However, data from the British National Corpus shows that confirmation-demanding tag questions may also be used outside institutional settings and in situations with various power relationships. Most of these examples are from fiction dialogue, where conflicts and confrontations are often depicted. In courtrooms, there is always an audience; however, in fiction dialogue, most confirmation-demanding questions in the data are found in private conversations. Confirmation-demanding tag questions seldom seem to be captured in conversational data, apart from in cases where the speaker wants the answer to be heard by a third party; it is therefore suggested that private confrontations might be underrepresented in conversational data. This paper also discusses functional categorizations of tag questions in general and argues that the unit of analysis should be the whole tag question, i.e. the anchor and the tag taken together, and not just the tag.
This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how th... more This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how the use of such tags is restricted in relation to the preceding clause, the anchor. The focus is on a category labelled grammatically-dependent question tags (GDQTs). Earlier research has claimed that almost only English has such question tags, but this article presents and compares data on GDQTs from more than ten languages, and suggests a hierarchy for features of grammatical dependence in question tags: polarity < tense < number/person < (semantic) gender (possibly also < verb substitution). The GDQT structures vary in different ways: all GDQT languages have negative GDQTs, but not all have positive GDQTs; verb substitution is not always applied and constant polarity instead of reversed polarity is also found.
Corpora: pragmatics and disocurse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008, 2009
It seems quite clear that there must be differences in the language of fiction dialogue and the n... more It seems quite clear that there must be differences in the language of fiction dialogue and the narrative parts of fiction, but fiction is often treated in corpus linguistics as if it were a homogenous genre, and there is very little quantitative research on the language of direct speech in modern fiction. The main problem is that corpora are seldom annotated for direct speech, and if they are, the mark-up may be difficult to use. If there is no mark-up for direct speech, corpus query matches have to be categorized and sorted manually as being inside or outside direct speech, and the proportion of direct speech in the corpus fiction texts needs to be investigated using, for example, statistical methods. As these procedures are time consuming, there is a need for specially designed corpora where direct speech is annotated. Another problem is how to define direct speech, slightly different definitions may be applied depending on whether comparisons are to be made to the narrative parts of fiction or to real-life speech. A further problem is that existing corpora are not usually sampled with a view to providing a representative sample of fiction dialogue; it seems important that samples are taken from different kinds of books and from different parts of books.
Northern Lights: translation in the Nordic Countries (ed. by B. J. Epsten), 2009
This paper deals with Swedish translations of English tag questions and Swedish sources to Englis... more This paper deals with Swedish translations of English tag questions and Swedish sources to English tag questions in translations from Swedish into English. The data comes from the fiction parts of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). English question tags are usually variant, i.e. grammatically dependent on the preceding clause, the anchor, whereas Swedish question tags are invariant. The English tag questions are in this study divided into three types: 1. Tag questions with declarative anchors and reversed polarity, 2. Tag questions with declarative anchors and constant polarity, and 3. Tag questions with imperative anchors. The reason is that these types perform different functions in English, and they are thus hypothesized to have different sets of correspondences in Swedish. This proves to be the case; the most common Swedish correspondences to question tags of the first type are clause-internal modal adverbs, especially the modal particles väl and ju, and invariant tags, or combinations of these, whereas tag questions of the other types mostly have a range of other kinds of translations. The large majority of tag questions are of the first type; accordingly, this paper focuses on the Swedish correspondences of such tag questions. There are clear differences in the Swedish translations of and sources to such question tags: invariant tags are most common in the Swedish translations, whereas modal adverbs dominate in the Swedish sources. Combinations of a modal adverb and an invariant tag are only found in the Swedish translations, and this might be seen as a result of the translation process. The Swedish invariant tags eller hur and inte sant are overused in the Swedish translations compared to the Swedish sources (and the Swedish originals), which means that the sentence type tagged declarative is also overused in the Swedish translations.
Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and a target language: aspects on translation studies] (ed. by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist), 2006
This study compares the frequencies of tag questions in translated English texts and English orig... more This study compares the frequencies of tag questions in translated English texts and English original texts as well as in English texts translated from Swedish and from Norwegian, using data from the fiction parts of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. Tag questions are found to be underused in translated English, and especially in translations from Swedish. The sources of the question tag translations in the Swedish and Nor-wegian original texts are then examined to discover reasons for this difference between translations from these two closely related languages. It is suggested that this may be because Norwegian, unlike Swedish, has question tags of the English type and appears to use more right-dislocated elements and ‘pure’ declarative questions.
UCCTS 2018, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 12–14 September 2018, 2018
The aim of this study is to establish what happens to questions (here defined as clauses/fragment... more The aim of this study is to establish what happens to questions (here defined as clauses/fragments followed by a question mark) in English fiction texts when they are translated into Swedish and Norwegian (bokmål). The focus is on non-congruent translations (cf. Fredriksson 2016), in particular when there is a change into another question type or into a non-question, e.g. a statement. Swedish and Norwegian are closely related languages with similar word order: they use subject-finite verb inversion in interrogative structures and are both V2-languages (i.e. in declarative structures, the finite verb is normally positioned after the first clause constituent, which may be the subject but is often e.g. an adverbial, resulting in subject-finite verb inversion in many declarative clauses as the subject has to be postponed to after the finite verb). Being North Germanic languages, Swedish and Norwegian are also fairly closely related to English: the major question types (wh-questions, yes/no-questions, alternative questions, declarative questions, tag questions, fragments and indirect questions) are common in all three languages. The default translation is thus a congruent translation. It is therefore interesting to investigate when and why non-congruent translations are used: are these due to subtle contrastive differences, e.g. one language preferring a particular question type more than the other languages, or to translation universals such as explicitation and normalisation, or to the translator’s choice of an idiomatic clause/phrase instead of a less idiomatic congruent translation?
There have been many translation/contrastive studies investigating English vs. Swedish (e.g. Aijmer 2017) and Norwegian (e.g. Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), but questions in general have seemingly not been treated except for a restricted pilot study on Norwegian vs. English by Wikberg (1996), who, however, disregarded question fragments by only looking at sentences of at least 7–10 words before the question mark. There are also previous studies only dealing with tag questions in translations between English and Swedish/Norwegian (Axelsson 2006, 2009).
Here are some research questions within this project: • To what extent are phrases/clauses ending in questions marks not translated into phrases/clauses ending in question marks? • To what extent and why are various question types translated non-congruently? What question types (or other clause types) are these non-congruent translations? • Are there any changes in the functions of questions in the translations, and if so, why? • How often and why are there changes in polarity in the translations of questions? • Are there differences in the translation patterns for questions in dialogue and non-dialogue? • What differences in translation patterns of questions can be seen between Swedish and Norwegian?
The data for this study has been retrieved from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Aijmer et al. 2001) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson et al. 1999/2002). These corpora, the ESPC and the ENPC, are similarly designed and may be searched using the same web interface. For English originals (EO), the ESPC comprises 25 English novel extracts with their translations into Swedish and the ENPC 30 English novel extracts with their translations into Norwegian. The 24 files in EO that are (in principle) identical to both corpora are used in the present study. These subcorpora are here called ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24 and each contain about 330,000 words; they are jointly referred to as ESPC/ENPC-EO24. In both ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24, all question marks were retrieved with contexts and translations. After minor differences due to scanning errors have been dealt with, the dataset consists of 2,026 English questions. The dataset of Swedish translations of English questions is called ESPC-ST24 and the dataset of Norwegian translations of English questions ENPC-NT24. However, all question marks have also been retrieved from the full subcorpora ESPC-ST24 and ENPC-ST24, i.e. including the use of question marks in Swedish/Norwegian when there is no question mark in English. This reveals that the total number of question marks are just slightly lower in ESPC-ST24 than in ESPC/ENPC-EO24 (2,012) and very close to ESPC/ENPC-EO24 in ENPC-NT24 (2,025). This might lead to the conclusion that there are no large differences between the originals and the translation as to question marks, but there are changes in two ways: question marks disappear in translations in some cases and are added in other cases.
A question mark in English is not translated into a question mark in Swedish in 93 cases and into Norwegian in 76 cases. Among these 4–5% where there is no question mark in the translation, full stops are predominant, but other punctuation marks such as commas and exclamation marks also occur. There are also a few cases where the translator, for some reason or other, has not translated the question at all, and therefore some potential question marks have disappeared in the translations. English wh-questions (n=641) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian wh-questions in 7–8% of the cases: in most cases, the translations are instead yes/no-questions or declaratives, but there are also e.g. wh-fragments and indirect questions. English yes/no-questions (n=572) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian yes/no-questions in 8–9% of the cases: all the major question types are found as translations but declaratives, wh-questions and indirect questions prevail. Various kinds of fragments form about a quarter of all questions in ESPC/ENPC-EO12, most of them being wh-fragments and NP-fragments. As to wh-fragments (n=180), there is a significant difference between translations into Swedish and Norwegian (p<0.01): 33% are not translated into Norwegian wh-fragments and 51% are not translated into Swedish wh-fragments. This is partly due to English fragments with what about and what if having counterparts in Norwegian but not in Swedish. Less than half of the English declarative questions are translated into declarative questions, which might indicate that Swedish and Norwegian translators find these less acceptable in Swedish/Norwegian fiction texts. Whereas only 2% of the translations involve a change from positive to negative polarity, 11% change from negative to positive. Although there are distributional differences between question types in English dialogue vs. non-dialogue (e.g. wh-questions having a significantly larger proportion in non-dialogue), there do not seem to be any large differences between the translation patterns in dialogue and non-dialogue.
Aijmer, Karin. (2017). The semantic field of obligation in an English-Swedish contrastive perspective. In Contrastive analysis of discourse-pragmatic aspects of linguistic genres, edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, 13–32. Cham: Springer.
Axelsson, Karin. (2006). Tag questions in English translations from Swedish and Norwegian – are there differences? In Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and as a target language: aspects on translation studies], edited by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist, 4–21. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.
Axelsson, Karin. (2009). Tag questions in translations between English and Swedish. In Northern lights: translation in the Nordic countries, edited by B. J. Epstein, 81–106. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell and Jarle Ebeling. (2017). A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Contrasting English and other languages through corpora, edited by Marketá Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Michaela Martinková, 2–31. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Fredriksson, Anna-Lena. (2016). A corpus-based contrastive study of the passive and related constructions in English and Swedish. PhD thesis. Gothenburg: Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg.
Wikberg, Kay. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In Synchronic corpus linguistics. Papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16), edited by Carol E. Percy, Charles F. Meyer and Ian Lancashire, 17–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Questioning Questions, Roskilde, Denmark, 15 November 2018, 2018
This presentation deals with a study on what happens to questions (clauses or phrases followed by... more This presentation deals with a study on what happens to questions (clauses or phrases followed by a question mark) in translations of English fiction texts into Swedish and Norwegian. The data comes from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), more precisely the 24 English original files that are identical in the English original parts of the corpora. The query results include the aligned translations in Swedish and Norwegian, respectively. The dataset in English originals consists of 2,028 questions and their translations, all of which have been analysed for a range of features. As a complement, all question marks have also been searched for in the Swedish/Norwegian translations of English fiction texts. The study mainly treats three types of non-congruent translations: changes as to punctuation, question type and polarity. The focus in this presentation is on the cases where the question mark disappears in the translations (119 instances in Swedish and 87 in Norwegian) or appears in the translations without there being one in the English original (85 and 76 instances). In many of the cases where the Swedish translation of an English questions has no question mark, there is declarative word order but a modal particle such as väl or ju or an adverb such as kanske (‘perhaps’) indicates some degree of uncertainty, which might be resolved by the addressee. The change may also be due to an idiomatic expression in one of the languages. Only a few cases are due to different punctuation practices.
Questions and their responses have been studied in many ways, a recent contribution being a volum... more Questions and their responses have been studied in many ways, a recent contribution being a volume edited by de Ruiter (2012). Such studies have usually been made on real-life conversation or invented examples, whereas questions in writing have received fairly little attention. Biber et al. (1999) report that questions are rare in newspaper language and academic prose, whereas there are many more questions in fiction, although there are less than a third compared to conversation. Biber et al. state that “the presence of dialogue accounts for the relatively high frequency in fiction” (1999:211) compared to other writing, but without giving any separate frequencies for questions in fiction dialogue. Proportionally, they find that wh-questions are more common in fiction overall than in conversation, whereas tag questions are less common. Indeed, Axelsson (2011) shows that tag questions are used about three times less often in fiction dialogue than in everyday real-life conversation. The aim of the present project is to investigate the distribution of question types in English fiction dialogue as well as outside the dialogue, and how these questions are responded to, in particular yes/no-questions. Enfield and Sidnell (2015) discuss two main strategies in such answers – interjection and repetition – predicting that “in all languages interjection confirmations tend to accept the terms of the question to which they respond whereas repeat confirmations are more assertive” (2015:11) (cf. also e.g. Hakulinen (2001) for Finnish and Bolden (2016) for Russian). As repetition (e.g. I do/don’t) without an interjection/response word (e.g. Yes/No) seems less idiomatic in Swedish than in English, it is interesting to make a cross-linguistic study using a parallel corpus with these two languages, viz. the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). The study has started with the analysis of all examples with question marks in the English fiction originals (2,094 instances) together with some context, similar to the search Wikberg (1996) performed in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. By conducting the initial search on questions, all types of answers will be included, also repetitions and other answers without a response word. Swedish original fiction texts will then be studied and compared to English original fiction texts. Finally, translations between the two languages will be investigated. The project also involves the mark-up of direct speech in ESPC, so that frequency calculations can be made on fiction dialogue separately as well as on text parts outside the dialogue.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogue. Ph.D., University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/24047. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Bolden, G. B. (2016). A simple da?: affirming responses to polar questions in Russian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 100, 40–58. de Ruiter, J. P. (ed.) (2012). Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enfield, N. J. & Sidnell, J. (2015). Language structure and social agency: confirming polar questions in conversation. Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1), 131–143. Hakulinen, A. (2001). Minimal and non-minimal answers to yes-no questions. Pragmatics 11 (1), 1–15. Wikberg, K. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: Evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In C. E. Percy, C. F. Meyer & I. Lancashire (Eds.), Synchronic Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 17–28.
BNC and ICE-GB have been utilised several times to study the use of canonical tag questions (TQs)... more BNC and ICE-GB have been utilised several times to study the use of canonical tag questions (TQs) in British English conversation. The spoken demographic part of BNC (henceforth BNC1994D) is used by e.g. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006) and Axelsson (2011), and spoken parts of ICE-GB by e.g. Gómez-González (2012) and Kimps (2016). The contraction innit (derived from isn’t it/ain’t it and therefore also canonical) has received much attention during the last decades, based on data from BNC, COLT and the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (e.g. Krug 1998, Andersen 2001, Torgersen et al. 2011, Pichler 2013, Palacios Martínez 2015). Due to the development of innit and as BNC, COLT and ICE-GB reflect English two decades ago and as LIC is restricted to the London area and focuses mainly on teenagers, it is high time to study canonical TQs including innit in contemporary conversation throughout Britain. The study of TQs presented here is based on data from a 5-million-token Early Access Subset of a new corpus of British English conversation, Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017 fc.). After thinning, 497 TQs with declarative anchors, DecTQs, (including innit) were identified and analysed. As some speakers with very many instances in the dataset skewed the results severely, all speakers with more than 75,000 words were removed, and a subcorpus called BNC2014ER with 362 speakers was created: this reduced dataset contains 238 TQs. The normalised frequency of DecTQs (including innit) in BNC2014ER is 2,747 per million words (pmw), i.e. much lower than in BNC1994D: 5,062 pmw. As there were so few innit in the dataset, a separate search for all instances in BNC2014R was conducted, resulting in a frequency of just 76 pmw (N=203) compared to 396 pmw (N=114) in BNC1994D. These low frequencies indicate that both innit and other DecTQs are losing ground. However, one may question whether the two BNC corpora are completely comparable for the study of DecTQs since they have been compiled in different ways. BNC2014E uses crowd-sourcing where the requirements of good recording quality seem to favour more focused conversations than in BNC1994D, where the respondents were chosen randomly and told to record all spoken interactions during two days. The low number of innit might partly be due to transcription guidelines saying “only use innit when you are sure: otherwise either use isn’t it or ain’t it” combined with the clearer recordings. Apart from mere frequencies, this study also compares formal features, functions and sociolinguistics factors. DecTQs in general are used to similar extents by both genders, whereas men use innit significantly more often than women. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006:304) found that, in BNC1994D, speakers older than about 25 used more TQs than younger speakers. The data in BNC2014ER indicates that the cut-off between younger and older speakers is instead around the age of 40. Innit is most frequent in the age group 19–29 and then gradually decreases. There are no significant differences as to social grade for DecTQs in general, whereas innit is associated with the lower grades.
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: a relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag questions in fiction dialogue. (PhD), University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. Gómez-González, M. (2012). The question of tag questions in English and Spanish. In I. Moskowich & B. Crespo (Eds.), Encoding the past, decoding the future: corpora in the 21st century (pp. 59–97). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholarly Press. Kimps, D. (2016). English variable tag questions: a typology of their interpersonal meanings. (PhD), KU Leuven, Leuven. Krug, M. (1998). British English is developing a new discourse marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 23(2), 145–197. Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017 fc). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3). Palacios Martínez, I. M. (2015). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 383–405. Pichler, H. (2013). The structure of discourse-pragmatic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Torgersen, E. N., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S., & Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–118. Tottie, G., & Hoffmann, S. (2006). Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 34(4), 283–311.
Corpus Linguistics International Conference 2017, 2017
This presentation deals with comparability problems between the new Spoken BNC2014 (Early Access ... more This presentation deals with comparability problems between the new Spoken BNC2014 (Early Access Subset) and the demographic part of the original British National Corpus. The two corpora differ as to compilation method (BNC2014 favouring more focused conversations on a somewhat higher style), balancing of sociolinguistic features (uneven representation of age and social grade in BNC2014), transcription principles (e.g. less punctuation in BNC2014) and maximum shares of individual speakers (higher in BNC2014). This is illustrated by findings from a study on tag questions in these corpora. The presentation also discusses whether other units than words/tokens should be used for normalized frequencies.
This study investigates the use of tag questions (TQs) in British English fiction dialogue by mak... more This study investigates the use of tag questions (TQs) in British English fiction dialogue by making comparisons to spoken conversation. Data has been retrieved from two subcorpora of the British National Corpus (BNC): a Fiction Subcorpus and the demographic part of the spo-ken component. More than 2,500 TQs have been analysed for their formal features and more than 600 TQs also for their pragmatic functions.
The results show that declarative tag questions (DecTQs) are underrepresented in fiction dia-logue, whereas imperative tag questions (ImpTQs) are overrepresented. Moreover, several dif-ferences between the formal features and pragmatic functions of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conversation have been reported.
In fiction, reporting clauses and comments in the narrative provide the reader with informa-tion the author believes the reader needs to interpret the dialogue in the way the author has in-tended; hence, fiction dialogue is enriched with information which is useful in the analysis of a linguistic phenomenon such as the TQ.
For the functional analysis of TQs, a hierarchical model has been developed and applied. Most DecTQs turn out to be used rhetorically; only a minority are response-eliciting and, in fiction dialogue, a small number also exchange goods and services. The functional patterns for DecTQs are quite different in the two subcorpora. Most rhetorical DecTQs are addressee-ori-ented in fiction dialogue, but speaker-centred in spoken conversation. Among the response-eliciting DecTQs, there are similar proportions of confirmation-seeking DecTQs, but, in fiction dialogue, there are proportionately more confirmation-demanding DecTQs, and also a few con-versation-initiating DecTQs. All ImpTQs exchange goods and services; in fiction dialogue, there is a higher proportion of ImpTQs used as commands, and a lower proportion of ImpTQs providing advice.
The distinctive functional patterns for TQs in fiction dialogue seem largely due to the de-piction of problems, conflicts and confrontations and an avoidance of conversations on trivial matters. In fiction dialogue, authors utilize the full potential of DecTQs, which results in large formal and functional variation, whereas they tend to prefer the most conventional form of Imp-TQs. Differences between the functional patterns of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conver-sation may partly explain the differences in frequencies and formal features.
Keywords: tag questions, fiction dialogue, direct speech, spoken conversation, pragmatics, cor-pus-based study, BNC, British English
Subjectivity and epistemicity: corpus, discourse, and literary approaches to stance (ed. by Dylan Glynn and Mette Sjölin). Lund Studies in English 117., 2014
This paper deals with tag questions to which an answer is demanded by a speaker who is certain ab... more This paper deals with tag questions to which an answer is demanded by a speaker who is certain about the truth of the proposition but who wants to hear the answer uttered by the addressee. Similar tag questions have previously been described based on data from courtrooms (e.g. Biscetti 2006), where tag questions are typically used by powerful speakers. However, data from the British National Corpus shows that confirmation-demanding tag questions may also be used outside institutional settings and in situations with various power relationships. Most of these examples are from fiction dialogue, where conflicts and confrontations are often depicted. In courtrooms, there is always an audience; however, in fiction dialogue, most confirmation-demanding questions in the data are found in private conversations. Confirmation-demanding tag questions seldom seem to be captured in conversational data, apart from in cases where the speaker wants the answer to be heard by a third party; it is therefore suggested that private confrontations might be underrepresented in conversational data. This paper also discusses functional categorizations of tag questions in general and argues that the unit of analysis should be the whole tag question, i.e. the anchor and the tag taken together, and not just the tag.
This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how th... more This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how the use of such tags is restricted in relation to the preceding clause, the anchor. The focus is on a category labelled grammatically-dependent question tags (GDQTs). Earlier research has claimed that almost only English has such question tags, but this article presents and compares data on GDQTs from more than ten languages, and suggests a hierarchy for features of grammatical dependence in question tags: polarity < tense < number/person < (semantic) gender (possibly also < verb substitution). The GDQT structures vary in different ways: all GDQT languages have negative GDQTs, but not all have positive GDQTs; verb substitution is not always applied and constant polarity instead of reversed polarity is also found.
Corpora: pragmatics and disocurse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14–18 May 2008, 2009
It seems quite clear that there must be differences in the language of fiction dialogue and the n... more It seems quite clear that there must be differences in the language of fiction dialogue and the narrative parts of fiction, but fiction is often treated in corpus linguistics as if it were a homogenous genre, and there is very little quantitative research on the language of direct speech in modern fiction. The main problem is that corpora are seldom annotated for direct speech, and if they are, the mark-up may be difficult to use. If there is no mark-up for direct speech, corpus query matches have to be categorized and sorted manually as being inside or outside direct speech, and the proportion of direct speech in the corpus fiction texts needs to be investigated using, for example, statistical methods. As these procedures are time consuming, there is a need for specially designed corpora where direct speech is annotated. Another problem is how to define direct speech, slightly different definitions may be applied depending on whether comparisons are to be made to the narrative parts of fiction or to real-life speech. A further problem is that existing corpora are not usually sampled with a view to providing a representative sample of fiction dialogue; it seems important that samples are taken from different kinds of books and from different parts of books.
Northern Lights: translation in the Nordic Countries (ed. by B. J. Epsten), 2009
This paper deals with Swedish translations of English tag questions and Swedish sources to Englis... more This paper deals with Swedish translations of English tag questions and Swedish sources to English tag questions in translations from Swedish into English. The data comes from the fiction parts of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). English question tags are usually variant, i.e. grammatically dependent on the preceding clause, the anchor, whereas Swedish question tags are invariant. The English tag questions are in this study divided into three types: 1. Tag questions with declarative anchors and reversed polarity, 2. Tag questions with declarative anchors and constant polarity, and 3. Tag questions with imperative anchors. The reason is that these types perform different functions in English, and they are thus hypothesized to have different sets of correspondences in Swedish. This proves to be the case; the most common Swedish correspondences to question tags of the first type are clause-internal modal adverbs, especially the modal particles väl and ju, and invariant tags, or combinations of these, whereas tag questions of the other types mostly have a range of other kinds of translations. The large majority of tag questions are of the first type; accordingly, this paper focuses on the Swedish correspondences of such tag questions. There are clear differences in the Swedish translations of and sources to such question tags: invariant tags are most common in the Swedish translations, whereas modal adverbs dominate in the Swedish sources. Combinations of a modal adverb and an invariant tag are only found in the Swedish translations, and this might be seen as a result of the translation process. The Swedish invariant tags eller hur and inte sant are overused in the Swedish translations compared to the Swedish sources (and the Swedish originals), which means that the sentence type tagged declarative is also overused in the Swedish translations.
Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and a target language: aspects on translation studies] (ed. by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist), 2006
This study compares the frequencies of tag questions in translated English texts and English orig... more This study compares the frequencies of tag questions in translated English texts and English original texts as well as in English texts translated from Swedish and from Norwegian, using data from the fiction parts of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. Tag questions are found to be underused in translated English, and especially in translations from Swedish. The sources of the question tag translations in the Swedish and Nor-wegian original texts are then examined to discover reasons for this difference between translations from these two closely related languages. It is suggested that this may be because Norwegian, unlike Swedish, has question tags of the English type and appears to use more right-dislocated elements and ‘pure’ declarative questions.
UCCTS 2018, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 12–14 September 2018, 2018
The aim of this study is to establish what happens to questions (here defined as clauses/fragment... more The aim of this study is to establish what happens to questions (here defined as clauses/fragments followed by a question mark) in English fiction texts when they are translated into Swedish and Norwegian (bokmål). The focus is on non-congruent translations (cf. Fredriksson 2016), in particular when there is a change into another question type or into a non-question, e.g. a statement. Swedish and Norwegian are closely related languages with similar word order: they use subject-finite verb inversion in interrogative structures and are both V2-languages (i.e. in declarative structures, the finite verb is normally positioned after the first clause constituent, which may be the subject but is often e.g. an adverbial, resulting in subject-finite verb inversion in many declarative clauses as the subject has to be postponed to after the finite verb). Being North Germanic languages, Swedish and Norwegian are also fairly closely related to English: the major question types (wh-questions, yes/no-questions, alternative questions, declarative questions, tag questions, fragments and indirect questions) are common in all three languages. The default translation is thus a congruent translation. It is therefore interesting to investigate when and why non-congruent translations are used: are these due to subtle contrastive differences, e.g. one language preferring a particular question type more than the other languages, or to translation universals such as explicitation and normalisation, or to the translator’s choice of an idiomatic clause/phrase instead of a less idiomatic congruent translation?
There have been many translation/contrastive studies investigating English vs. Swedish (e.g. Aijmer 2017) and Norwegian (e.g. Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), but questions in general have seemingly not been treated except for a restricted pilot study on Norwegian vs. English by Wikberg (1996), who, however, disregarded question fragments by only looking at sentences of at least 7–10 words before the question mark. There are also previous studies only dealing with tag questions in translations between English and Swedish/Norwegian (Axelsson 2006, 2009).
Here are some research questions within this project: • To what extent are phrases/clauses ending in questions marks not translated into phrases/clauses ending in question marks? • To what extent and why are various question types translated non-congruently? What question types (or other clause types) are these non-congruent translations? • Are there any changes in the functions of questions in the translations, and if so, why? • How often and why are there changes in polarity in the translations of questions? • Are there differences in the translation patterns for questions in dialogue and non-dialogue? • What differences in translation patterns of questions can be seen between Swedish and Norwegian?
The data for this study has been retrieved from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Aijmer et al. 2001) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson et al. 1999/2002). These corpora, the ESPC and the ENPC, are similarly designed and may be searched using the same web interface. For English originals (EO), the ESPC comprises 25 English novel extracts with their translations into Swedish and the ENPC 30 English novel extracts with their translations into Norwegian. The 24 files in EO that are (in principle) identical to both corpora are used in the present study. These subcorpora are here called ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24 and each contain about 330,000 words; they are jointly referred to as ESPC/ENPC-EO24. In both ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24, all question marks were retrieved with contexts and translations. After minor differences due to scanning errors have been dealt with, the dataset consists of 2,026 English questions. The dataset of Swedish translations of English questions is called ESPC-ST24 and the dataset of Norwegian translations of English questions ENPC-NT24. However, all question marks have also been retrieved from the full subcorpora ESPC-ST24 and ENPC-ST24, i.e. including the use of question marks in Swedish/Norwegian when there is no question mark in English. This reveals that the total number of question marks are just slightly lower in ESPC-ST24 than in ESPC/ENPC-EO24 (2,012) and very close to ESPC/ENPC-EO24 in ENPC-NT24 (2,025). This might lead to the conclusion that there are no large differences between the originals and the translation as to question marks, but there are changes in two ways: question marks disappear in translations in some cases and are added in other cases.
A question mark in English is not translated into a question mark in Swedish in 93 cases and into Norwegian in 76 cases. Among these 4–5% where there is no question mark in the translation, full stops are predominant, but other punctuation marks such as commas and exclamation marks also occur. There are also a few cases where the translator, for some reason or other, has not translated the question at all, and therefore some potential question marks have disappeared in the translations. English wh-questions (n=641) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian wh-questions in 7–8% of the cases: in most cases, the translations are instead yes/no-questions or declaratives, but there are also e.g. wh-fragments and indirect questions. English yes/no-questions (n=572) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian yes/no-questions in 8–9% of the cases: all the major question types are found as translations but declaratives, wh-questions and indirect questions prevail. Various kinds of fragments form about a quarter of all questions in ESPC/ENPC-EO12, most of them being wh-fragments and NP-fragments. As to wh-fragments (n=180), there is a significant difference between translations into Swedish and Norwegian (p<0.01): 33% are not translated into Norwegian wh-fragments and 51% are not translated into Swedish wh-fragments. This is partly due to English fragments with what about and what if having counterparts in Norwegian but not in Swedish. Less than half of the English declarative questions are translated into declarative questions, which might indicate that Swedish and Norwegian translators find these less acceptable in Swedish/Norwegian fiction texts. Whereas only 2% of the translations involve a change from positive to negative polarity, 11% change from negative to positive. Although there are distributional differences between question types in English dialogue vs. non-dialogue (e.g. wh-questions having a significantly larger proportion in non-dialogue), there do not seem to be any large differences between the translation patterns in dialogue and non-dialogue.
Aijmer, Karin. (2017). The semantic field of obligation in an English-Swedish contrastive perspective. In Contrastive analysis of discourse-pragmatic aspects of linguistic genres, edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, 13–32. Cham: Springer.
Axelsson, Karin. (2006). Tag questions in English translations from Swedish and Norwegian – are there differences? In Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and as a target language: aspects on translation studies], edited by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist, 4–21. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.
Axelsson, Karin. (2009). Tag questions in translations between English and Swedish. In Northern lights: translation in the Nordic countries, edited by B. J. Epstein, 81–106. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell and Jarle Ebeling. (2017). A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Contrasting English and other languages through corpora, edited by Marketá Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Michaela Martinková, 2–31. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Fredriksson, Anna-Lena. (2016). A corpus-based contrastive study of the passive and related constructions in English and Swedish. PhD thesis. Gothenburg: Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg.
Wikberg, Kay. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In Synchronic corpus linguistics. Papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16), edited by Carol E. Percy, Charles F. Meyer and Ian Lancashire, 17–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Questioning Questions, Roskilde, Denmark, 15 November 2018, 2018
This presentation deals with a study on what happens to questions (clauses or phrases followed by... more This presentation deals with a study on what happens to questions (clauses or phrases followed by a question mark) in translations of English fiction texts into Swedish and Norwegian. The data comes from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), more precisely the 24 English original files that are identical in the English original parts of the corpora. The query results include the aligned translations in Swedish and Norwegian, respectively. The dataset in English originals consists of 2,028 questions and their translations, all of which have been analysed for a range of features. As a complement, all question marks have also been searched for in the Swedish/Norwegian translations of English fiction texts. The study mainly treats three types of non-congruent translations: changes as to punctuation, question type and polarity. The focus in this presentation is on the cases where the question mark disappears in the translations (119 instances in Swedish and 87 in Norwegian) or appears in the translations without there being one in the English original (85 and 76 instances). In many of the cases where the Swedish translation of an English questions has no question mark, there is declarative word order but a modal particle such as väl or ju or an adverb such as kanske (‘perhaps’) indicates some degree of uncertainty, which might be resolved by the addressee. The change may also be due to an idiomatic expression in one of the languages. Only a few cases are due to different punctuation practices.
Questions and their responses have been studied in many ways, a recent contribution being a volum... more Questions and their responses have been studied in many ways, a recent contribution being a volume edited by de Ruiter (2012). Such studies have usually been made on real-life conversation or invented examples, whereas questions in writing have received fairly little attention. Biber et al. (1999) report that questions are rare in newspaper language and academic prose, whereas there are many more questions in fiction, although there are less than a third compared to conversation. Biber et al. state that “the presence of dialogue accounts for the relatively high frequency in fiction” (1999:211) compared to other writing, but without giving any separate frequencies for questions in fiction dialogue. Proportionally, they find that wh-questions are more common in fiction overall than in conversation, whereas tag questions are less common. Indeed, Axelsson (2011) shows that tag questions are used about three times less often in fiction dialogue than in everyday real-life conversation. The aim of the present project is to investigate the distribution of question types in English fiction dialogue as well as outside the dialogue, and how these questions are responded to, in particular yes/no-questions. Enfield and Sidnell (2015) discuss two main strategies in such answers – interjection and repetition – predicting that “in all languages interjection confirmations tend to accept the terms of the question to which they respond whereas repeat confirmations are more assertive” (2015:11) (cf. also e.g. Hakulinen (2001) for Finnish and Bolden (2016) for Russian). As repetition (e.g. I do/don’t) without an interjection/response word (e.g. Yes/No) seems less idiomatic in Swedish than in English, it is interesting to make a cross-linguistic study using a parallel corpus with these two languages, viz. the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). The study has started with the analysis of all examples with question marks in the English fiction originals (2,094 instances) together with some context, similar to the search Wikberg (1996) performed in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. By conducting the initial search on questions, all types of answers will be included, also repetitions and other answers without a response word. Swedish original fiction texts will then be studied and compared to English original fiction texts. Finally, translations between the two languages will be investigated. The project also involves the mark-up of direct speech in ESPC, so that frequency calculations can be made on fiction dialogue separately as well as on text parts outside the dialogue.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogue. Ph.D., University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/24047. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Bolden, G. B. (2016). A simple da?: affirming responses to polar questions in Russian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 100, 40–58. de Ruiter, J. P. (ed.) (2012). Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enfield, N. J. & Sidnell, J. (2015). Language structure and social agency: confirming polar questions in conversation. Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1), 131–143. Hakulinen, A. (2001). Minimal and non-minimal answers to yes-no questions. Pragmatics 11 (1), 1–15. Wikberg, K. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: Evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In C. E. Percy, C. F. Meyer & I. Lancashire (Eds.), Synchronic Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 17–28.
BNC and ICE-GB have been utilised several times to study the use of canonical tag questions (TQs)... more BNC and ICE-GB have been utilised several times to study the use of canonical tag questions (TQs) in British English conversation. The spoken demographic part of BNC (henceforth BNC1994D) is used by e.g. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006) and Axelsson (2011), and spoken parts of ICE-GB by e.g. Gómez-González (2012) and Kimps (2016). The contraction innit (derived from isn’t it/ain’t it and therefore also canonical) has received much attention during the last decades, based on data from BNC, COLT and the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (e.g. Krug 1998, Andersen 2001, Torgersen et al. 2011, Pichler 2013, Palacios Martínez 2015). Due to the development of innit and as BNC, COLT and ICE-GB reflect English two decades ago and as LIC is restricted to the London area and focuses mainly on teenagers, it is high time to study canonical TQs including innit in contemporary conversation throughout Britain. The study of TQs presented here is based on data from a 5-million-token Early Access Subset of a new corpus of British English conversation, Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017 fc.). After thinning, 497 TQs with declarative anchors, DecTQs, (including innit) were identified and analysed. As some speakers with very many instances in the dataset skewed the results severely, all speakers with more than 75,000 words were removed, and a subcorpus called BNC2014ER with 362 speakers was created: this reduced dataset contains 238 TQs. The normalised frequency of DecTQs (including innit) in BNC2014ER is 2,747 per million words (pmw), i.e. much lower than in BNC1994D: 5,062 pmw. As there were so few innit in the dataset, a separate search for all instances in BNC2014R was conducted, resulting in a frequency of just 76 pmw (N=203) compared to 396 pmw (N=114) in BNC1994D. These low frequencies indicate that both innit and other DecTQs are losing ground. However, one may question whether the two BNC corpora are completely comparable for the study of DecTQs since they have been compiled in different ways. BNC2014E uses crowd-sourcing where the requirements of good recording quality seem to favour more focused conversations than in BNC1994D, where the respondents were chosen randomly and told to record all spoken interactions during two days. The low number of innit might partly be due to transcription guidelines saying “only use innit when you are sure: otherwise either use isn’t it or ain’t it” combined with the clearer recordings. Apart from mere frequencies, this study also compares formal features, functions and sociolinguistics factors. DecTQs in general are used to similar extents by both genders, whereas men use innit significantly more often than women. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006:304) found that, in BNC1994D, speakers older than about 25 used more TQs than younger speakers. The data in BNC2014ER indicates that the cut-off between younger and older speakers is instead around the age of 40. Innit is most frequent in the age group 19–29 and then gradually decreases. There are no significant differences as to social grade for DecTQs in general, whereas innit is associated with the lower grades.
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: a relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag questions in fiction dialogue. (PhD), University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. Gómez-González, M. (2012). The question of tag questions in English and Spanish. In I. Moskowich & B. Crespo (Eds.), Encoding the past, decoding the future: corpora in the 21st century (pp. 59–97). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholarly Press. Kimps, D. (2016). English variable tag questions: a typology of their interpersonal meanings. (PhD), KU Leuven, Leuven. Krug, M. (1998). British English is developing a new discourse marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 23(2), 145–197. Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017 fc). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3). Palacios Martínez, I. M. (2015). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 383–405. Pichler, H. (2013). The structure of discourse-pragmatic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Torgersen, E. N., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S., & Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–118. Tottie, G., & Hoffmann, S. (2006). Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 34(4), 283–311.
Corpus Linguistics International Conference 2017, 2017
This presentation deals with comparability problems between the new Spoken BNC2014 (Early Access ... more This presentation deals with comparability problems between the new Spoken BNC2014 (Early Access Subset) and the demographic part of the original British National Corpus. The two corpora differ as to compilation method (BNC2014 favouring more focused conversations on a somewhat higher style), balancing of sociolinguistic features (uneven representation of age and social grade in BNC2014), transcription principles (e.g. less punctuation in BNC2014) and maximum shares of individual speakers (higher in BNC2014). This is illustrated by findings from a study on tag questions in these corpora. The presentation also discusses whether other units than words/tokens should be used for normalized frequencies.
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The results show that declarative tag questions (DecTQs) are underrepresented in fiction dia-logue, whereas imperative tag questions (ImpTQs) are overrepresented. Moreover, several dif-ferences between the formal features and pragmatic functions of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conversation have been reported.
In fiction, reporting clauses and comments in the narrative provide the reader with informa-tion the author believes the reader needs to interpret the dialogue in the way the author has in-tended; hence, fiction dialogue is enriched with information which is useful in the analysis of a linguistic phenomenon such as the TQ.
For the functional analysis of TQs, a hierarchical model has been developed and applied. Most DecTQs turn out to be used rhetorically; only a minority are response-eliciting and, in fiction dialogue, a small number also exchange goods and services. The functional patterns for DecTQs are quite different in the two subcorpora. Most rhetorical DecTQs are addressee-ori-ented in fiction dialogue, but speaker-centred in spoken conversation. Among the response-eliciting DecTQs, there are similar proportions of confirmation-seeking DecTQs, but, in fiction dialogue, there are proportionately more confirmation-demanding DecTQs, and also a few con-versation-initiating DecTQs. All ImpTQs exchange goods and services; in fiction dialogue, there is a higher proportion of ImpTQs used as commands, and a lower proportion of ImpTQs providing advice.
The distinctive functional patterns for TQs in fiction dialogue seem largely due to the de-piction of problems, conflicts and confrontations and an avoidance of conversations on trivial matters. In fiction dialogue, authors utilize the full potential of DecTQs, which results in large formal and functional variation, whereas they tend to prefer the most conventional form of Imp-TQs. Differences between the functional patterns of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conver-sation may partly explain the differences in frequencies and formal features.
Keywords: tag questions, fiction dialogue, direct speech, spoken conversation, pragmatics, cor-pus-based study, BNC, British English
Papers by Karin Axelsson
Conference Presentations by Karin Axelsson
There have been many translation/contrastive studies investigating English vs. Swedish (e.g. Aijmer 2017) and Norwegian (e.g. Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), but questions in general have seemingly not been treated except for a restricted pilot study on Norwegian vs. English by Wikberg (1996), who, however, disregarded question fragments by only looking at sentences of at least 7–10 words before the question mark. There are also previous studies only dealing with tag questions in translations between English and Swedish/Norwegian (Axelsson 2006, 2009).
Here are some research questions within this project:
• To what extent are phrases/clauses ending in questions marks not translated into phrases/clauses ending in question marks?
• To what extent and why are various question types translated non-congruently? What question types (or other clause types) are these non-congruent translations?
• Are there any changes in the functions of questions in the translations, and if so, why?
• How often and why are there changes in polarity in the translations of questions?
• Are there differences in the translation patterns for questions in dialogue and non-dialogue?
• What differences in translation patterns of questions can be seen between Swedish and Norwegian?
The data for this study has been retrieved from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Aijmer et al. 2001) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson et al. 1999/2002). These corpora, the ESPC and the ENPC, are similarly designed and may be searched using the same web interface. For English originals (EO), the ESPC comprises 25 English novel extracts with their translations into Swedish and the ENPC 30 English novel extracts with their translations into Norwegian. The 24 files in EO that are (in principle) identical to both corpora are used in the present study. These subcorpora are here called ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24 and each contain about 330,000 words; they are jointly referred to as ESPC/ENPC-EO24. In both ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24, all question marks were retrieved with contexts and translations. After minor differences due to scanning errors have been dealt with, the dataset consists of 2,026 English questions. The dataset of Swedish translations of English questions is called ESPC-ST24 and the dataset of Norwegian translations of English questions ENPC-NT24. However, all question marks have also been retrieved from the full subcorpora ESPC-ST24 and ENPC-ST24, i.e. including the use of question marks in Swedish/Norwegian when there is no question mark in English. This reveals that the total number of question marks are just slightly lower in ESPC-ST24 than in ESPC/ENPC-EO24 (2,012) and very close to ESPC/ENPC-EO24 in ENPC-NT24 (2,025). This might lead to the conclusion that there are no large differences between the originals and the translation as to question marks, but there are changes in two ways: question marks disappear in translations in some cases and are added in other cases.
A question mark in English is not translated into a question mark in Swedish in 93 cases and into Norwegian in 76 cases. Among these 4–5% where there is no question mark in the translation, full stops are predominant, but other punctuation marks such as commas and exclamation marks also occur. There are also a few cases where the translator, for some reason or other, has not translated the question at all, and therefore some potential question marks have disappeared in the translations. English wh-questions (n=641) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian wh-questions in 7–8% of the cases: in most cases, the translations are instead yes/no-questions or declaratives, but there are also e.g. wh-fragments and indirect questions. English yes/no-questions (n=572) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian yes/no-questions in 8–9% of the cases: all the major question types are found as translations but declaratives, wh-questions and indirect questions prevail. Various kinds of fragments form about a quarter of all questions in ESPC/ENPC-EO12, most of them being wh-fragments and NP-fragments. As to wh-fragments (n=180), there is a significant difference between translations into Swedish and Norwegian (p<0.01): 33% are not translated into Norwegian wh-fragments and 51% are not translated into Swedish wh-fragments. This is partly due to English fragments with what about and what if having counterparts in Norwegian but not in Swedish. Less than half of the English declarative questions are translated into declarative questions, which might indicate that Swedish and Norwegian translators find these less acceptable in Swedish/Norwegian fiction texts. Whereas only 2% of the translations involve a change from positive to negative polarity, 11% change from negative to positive. Although there are distributional differences between question types in English dialogue vs. non-dialogue (e.g. wh-questions having a significantly larger proportion in non-dialogue), there do not seem to be any large differences between the translation patterns in dialogue and non-dialogue.
Aijmer, Karin. (2017). The semantic field of obligation in an English-Swedish contrastive perspective. In Contrastive analysis of discourse-pragmatic aspects of linguistic genres, edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, 13–32. Cham: Springer.
Aijmer, Karin, Bengt Altenberg and Mikael Svensson. (2001). English-Swedish Parallel Corpus: Manual. Available at
<https://sprak.gu.se/english/research/research-activities/corpus-linguistics/corpora-at-the-dll/espc>, accessed 22 January 2018.
Axelsson, Karin. (2006). Tag questions in English translations from Swedish and Norwegian – are there differences? In Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and as a target language: aspects on translation studies], edited by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist, 4–21. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.
Axelsson, Karin. (2009). Tag questions in translations between English and Swedish. In Northern lights: translation in the Nordic countries, edited by B. J. Epstein, 81–106. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell and Jarle Ebeling. (2017). A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Contrasting English and other languages through corpora, edited by Marketá Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Michaela Martinková, 2–31. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Fredriksson, Anna-Lena. (2016). A corpus-based contrastive study of the passive and related constructions in English and Swedish. PhD thesis. Gothenburg: Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg.
Johansson, Stig, Jarle Ebeling and Signe Oksefjell. (1999/2002). English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: Manual. Available at <http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/enpc>, accessed 22 January 2018.
Wikberg, Kay. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In Synchronic corpus linguistics. Papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16), edited by Carol E. Percy, Charles F. Meyer and Ian Lancashire, 17–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
mainly treats three types of non-congruent translations: changes as to
punctuation, question type and polarity. The focus in this presentation is on the cases where the question mark disappears in the translations (119 instances in Swedish and 87 in Norwegian) or appears in the translations without there being one in the English original (85 and 76 instances). In many of the cases where the Swedish translation of an English questions has no question mark, there is declarative word order but a modal particle such as väl or ju or an adverb such as kanske (‘perhaps’) indicates some degree of uncertainty, which might be
resolved by the addressee. The change may also be due to an idiomatic
expression in one of the languages. Only a few cases are due to different
punctuation practices.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogue. Ph.D., University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/24047.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Bolden, G. B. (2016). A simple da?: affirming responses to polar questions in Russian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 100, 40–58.
de Ruiter, J. P. (ed.) (2012). Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enfield, N. J. & Sidnell, J. (2015). Language structure and social agency: confirming polar questions in conversation. Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1), 131–143.
Hakulinen, A. (2001). Minimal and non-minimal answers to yes-no questions. Pragmatics 11 (1), 1–15.
Wikberg, K. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: Evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In C. E. Percy, C. F. Meyer & I. Lancashire (Eds.), Synchronic Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 17–28.
The study of TQs presented here is based on data from a 5-million-token Early Access Subset of a new corpus of British English conversation, Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017 fc.). After thinning, 497 TQs with declarative anchors, DecTQs, (including innit) were identified and analysed. As some speakers with very many instances in the dataset skewed the results severely, all speakers with more than 75,000 words were removed, and a subcorpus called BNC2014ER with 362 speakers was created: this reduced dataset contains 238 TQs. The normalised frequency of DecTQs (including innit) in BNC2014ER is 2,747 per million words (pmw), i.e. much lower than in BNC1994D: 5,062 pmw. As there were so few innit in the dataset, a separate search for all instances in BNC2014R was conducted, resulting in a frequency of just 76 pmw (N=203) compared to 396 pmw (N=114) in BNC1994D. These low frequencies indicate that both innit and other DecTQs are losing ground. However, one may question whether the two BNC corpora are completely comparable for the study of DecTQs since they have been compiled in different ways. BNC2014E uses crowd-sourcing where the requirements of good recording quality seem to favour more focused conversations than in BNC1994D, where the respondents were chosen randomly and told to record all spoken interactions during two days. The low number of innit might partly be due to transcription guidelines saying “only use innit when you are sure: otherwise either use isn’t it or ain’t it” combined with the clearer recordings.
Apart from mere frequencies, this study also compares formal features, functions and sociolinguistics factors. DecTQs in general are used to similar extents by both genders, whereas men use innit significantly more often than women. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006:304) found that, in BNC1994D, speakers older than about 25 used more TQs than younger speakers. The data in BNC2014ER indicates that the cut-off between younger and older speakers is instead around the age of 40. Innit is most frequent in the age group 19–29 and then gradually decreases. There are no significant differences as to social grade for DecTQs in general, whereas innit is associated with the lower grades.
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: a relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag questions in fiction dialogue. (PhD), University of Gothenburg, Göteborg.
Gómez-González, M. (2012). The question of tag questions in English and Spanish. In I. Moskowich & B. Crespo (Eds.), Encoding the past, decoding the future: corpora in the 21st century (pp. 59–97). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholarly Press.
Kimps, D. (2016). English variable tag questions: a typology of their interpersonal meanings. (PhD), KU Leuven, Leuven.
Krug, M. (1998). British English is developing a new discourse marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 23(2), 145–197.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017 fc). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3).
Palacios Martínez, I. M. (2015). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 383–405.
Pichler, H. (2013). The structure of discourse-pragmatic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Torgersen, E. N., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S., & Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–118.
Tottie, G., & Hoffmann, S. (2006). Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 34(4), 283–311.
The results show that declarative tag questions (DecTQs) are underrepresented in fiction dia-logue, whereas imperative tag questions (ImpTQs) are overrepresented. Moreover, several dif-ferences between the formal features and pragmatic functions of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conversation have been reported.
In fiction, reporting clauses and comments in the narrative provide the reader with informa-tion the author believes the reader needs to interpret the dialogue in the way the author has in-tended; hence, fiction dialogue is enriched with information which is useful in the analysis of a linguistic phenomenon such as the TQ.
For the functional analysis of TQs, a hierarchical model has been developed and applied. Most DecTQs turn out to be used rhetorically; only a minority are response-eliciting and, in fiction dialogue, a small number also exchange goods and services. The functional patterns for DecTQs are quite different in the two subcorpora. Most rhetorical DecTQs are addressee-ori-ented in fiction dialogue, but speaker-centred in spoken conversation. Among the response-eliciting DecTQs, there are similar proportions of confirmation-seeking DecTQs, but, in fiction dialogue, there are proportionately more confirmation-demanding DecTQs, and also a few con-versation-initiating DecTQs. All ImpTQs exchange goods and services; in fiction dialogue, there is a higher proportion of ImpTQs used as commands, and a lower proportion of ImpTQs providing advice.
The distinctive functional patterns for TQs in fiction dialogue seem largely due to the de-piction of problems, conflicts and confrontations and an avoidance of conversations on trivial matters. In fiction dialogue, authors utilize the full potential of DecTQs, which results in large formal and functional variation, whereas they tend to prefer the most conventional form of Imp-TQs. Differences between the functional patterns of TQs in fiction dialogue and spoken conver-sation may partly explain the differences in frequencies and formal features.
Keywords: tag questions, fiction dialogue, direct speech, spoken conversation, pragmatics, cor-pus-based study, BNC, British English
There have been many translation/contrastive studies investigating English vs. Swedish (e.g. Aijmer 2017) and Norwegian (e.g. Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), but questions in general have seemingly not been treated except for a restricted pilot study on Norwegian vs. English by Wikberg (1996), who, however, disregarded question fragments by only looking at sentences of at least 7–10 words before the question mark. There are also previous studies only dealing with tag questions in translations between English and Swedish/Norwegian (Axelsson 2006, 2009).
Here are some research questions within this project:
• To what extent are phrases/clauses ending in questions marks not translated into phrases/clauses ending in question marks?
• To what extent and why are various question types translated non-congruently? What question types (or other clause types) are these non-congruent translations?
• Are there any changes in the functions of questions in the translations, and if so, why?
• How often and why are there changes in polarity in the translations of questions?
• Are there differences in the translation patterns for questions in dialogue and non-dialogue?
• What differences in translation patterns of questions can be seen between Swedish and Norwegian?
The data for this study has been retrieved from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Aijmer et al. 2001) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson et al. 1999/2002). These corpora, the ESPC and the ENPC, are similarly designed and may be searched using the same web interface. For English originals (EO), the ESPC comprises 25 English novel extracts with their translations into Swedish and the ENPC 30 English novel extracts with their translations into Norwegian. The 24 files in EO that are (in principle) identical to both corpora are used in the present study. These subcorpora are here called ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24 and each contain about 330,000 words; they are jointly referred to as ESPC/ENPC-EO24. In both ESPC-EO24 and ENPC-EO24, all question marks were retrieved with contexts and translations. After minor differences due to scanning errors have been dealt with, the dataset consists of 2,026 English questions. The dataset of Swedish translations of English questions is called ESPC-ST24 and the dataset of Norwegian translations of English questions ENPC-NT24. However, all question marks have also been retrieved from the full subcorpora ESPC-ST24 and ENPC-ST24, i.e. including the use of question marks in Swedish/Norwegian when there is no question mark in English. This reveals that the total number of question marks are just slightly lower in ESPC-ST24 than in ESPC/ENPC-EO24 (2,012) and very close to ESPC/ENPC-EO24 in ENPC-NT24 (2,025). This might lead to the conclusion that there are no large differences between the originals and the translation as to question marks, but there are changes in two ways: question marks disappear in translations in some cases and are added in other cases.
A question mark in English is not translated into a question mark in Swedish in 93 cases and into Norwegian in 76 cases. Among these 4–5% where there is no question mark in the translation, full stops are predominant, but other punctuation marks such as commas and exclamation marks also occur. There are also a few cases where the translator, for some reason or other, has not translated the question at all, and therefore some potential question marks have disappeared in the translations. English wh-questions (n=641) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian wh-questions in 7–8% of the cases: in most cases, the translations are instead yes/no-questions or declaratives, but there are also e.g. wh-fragments and indirect questions. English yes/no-questions (n=572) are not translated into Swedish and Norwegian yes/no-questions in 8–9% of the cases: all the major question types are found as translations but declaratives, wh-questions and indirect questions prevail. Various kinds of fragments form about a quarter of all questions in ESPC/ENPC-EO12, most of them being wh-fragments and NP-fragments. As to wh-fragments (n=180), there is a significant difference between translations into Swedish and Norwegian (p<0.01): 33% are not translated into Norwegian wh-fragments and 51% are not translated into Swedish wh-fragments. This is partly due to English fragments with what about and what if having counterparts in Norwegian but not in Swedish. Less than half of the English declarative questions are translated into declarative questions, which might indicate that Swedish and Norwegian translators find these less acceptable in Swedish/Norwegian fiction texts. Whereas only 2% of the translations involve a change from positive to negative polarity, 11% change from negative to positive. Although there are distributional differences between question types in English dialogue vs. non-dialogue (e.g. wh-questions having a significantly larger proportion in non-dialogue), there do not seem to be any large differences between the translation patterns in dialogue and non-dialogue.
Aijmer, Karin. (2017). The semantic field of obligation in an English-Swedish contrastive perspective. In Contrastive analysis of discourse-pragmatic aspects of linguistic genres, edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, 13–32. Cham: Springer.
Aijmer, Karin, Bengt Altenberg and Mikael Svensson. (2001). English-Swedish Parallel Corpus: Manual. Available at
<https://sprak.gu.se/english/research/research-activities/corpus-linguistics/corpora-at-the-dll/espc>, accessed 22 January 2018.
Axelsson, Karin. (2006). Tag questions in English translations from Swedish and Norwegian – are there differences? In Svenska som källspråk och målspråk: aspekter på översättningsvetenskap [Swedish as a source language and as a target language: aspects on translation studies], edited by Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Hans Landqvist, 4–21. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.
Axelsson, Karin. (2009). Tag questions in translations between English and Swedish. In Northern lights: translation in the Nordic countries, edited by B. J. Epstein, 81–106. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell and Jarle Ebeling. (2017). A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Contrasting English and other languages through corpora, edited by Marketá Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Michaela Martinková, 2–31. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Fredriksson, Anna-Lena. (2016). A corpus-based contrastive study of the passive and related constructions in English and Swedish. PhD thesis. Gothenburg: Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg.
Johansson, Stig, Jarle Ebeling and Signe Oksefjell. (1999/2002). English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: Manual. Available at <http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/enpc>, accessed 22 January 2018.
Wikberg, Kay. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In Synchronic corpus linguistics. Papers from the sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16), edited by Carol E. Percy, Charles F. Meyer and Ian Lancashire, 17–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
mainly treats three types of non-congruent translations: changes as to
punctuation, question type and polarity. The focus in this presentation is on the cases where the question mark disappears in the translations (119 instances in Swedish and 87 in Norwegian) or appears in the translations without there being one in the English original (85 and 76 instances). In many of the cases where the Swedish translation of an English questions has no question mark, there is declarative word order but a modal particle such as väl or ju or an adverb such as kanske (‘perhaps’) indicates some degree of uncertainty, which might be
resolved by the addressee. The change may also be due to an idiomatic
expression in one of the languages. Only a few cases are due to different
punctuation practices.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag Questions in Fiction Dialogue. Ph.D., University of Gothenburg, Göteborg. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/24047.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Bolden, G. B. (2016). A simple da?: affirming responses to polar questions in Russian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 100, 40–58.
de Ruiter, J. P. (ed.) (2012). Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enfield, N. J. & Sidnell, J. (2015). Language structure and social agency: confirming polar questions in conversation. Linguistics Vanguard 1 (1), 131–143.
Hakulinen, A. (2001). Minimal and non-minimal answers to yes-no questions. Pragmatics 11 (1), 1–15.
Wikberg, K. (1996). Questions in English and Norwegian: Evidence from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. In C. E. Percy, C. F. Meyer & I. Lancashire (Eds.), Synchronic Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the Sixteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 16). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 17–28.
The study of TQs presented here is based on data from a 5-million-token Early Access Subset of a new corpus of British English conversation, Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017 fc.). After thinning, 497 TQs with declarative anchors, DecTQs, (including innit) were identified and analysed. As some speakers with very many instances in the dataset skewed the results severely, all speakers with more than 75,000 words were removed, and a subcorpus called BNC2014ER with 362 speakers was created: this reduced dataset contains 238 TQs. The normalised frequency of DecTQs (including innit) in BNC2014ER is 2,747 per million words (pmw), i.e. much lower than in BNC1994D: 5,062 pmw. As there were so few innit in the dataset, a separate search for all instances in BNC2014R was conducted, resulting in a frequency of just 76 pmw (N=203) compared to 396 pmw (N=114) in BNC1994D. These low frequencies indicate that both innit and other DecTQs are losing ground. However, one may question whether the two BNC corpora are completely comparable for the study of DecTQs since they have been compiled in different ways. BNC2014E uses crowd-sourcing where the requirements of good recording quality seem to favour more focused conversations than in BNC1994D, where the respondents were chosen randomly and told to record all spoken interactions during two days. The low number of innit might partly be due to transcription guidelines saying “only use innit when you are sure: otherwise either use isn’t it or ain’t it” combined with the clearer recordings.
Apart from mere frequencies, this study also compares formal features, functions and sociolinguistics factors. DecTQs in general are used to similar extents by both genders, whereas men use innit significantly more often than women. Tottie and Hoffmann (2006:304) found that, in BNC1994D, speakers older than about 25 used more TQs than younger speakers. The data in BNC2014ER indicates that the cut-off between younger and older speakers is instead around the age of 40. Innit is most frequent in the age group 19–29 and then gradually decreases. There are no significant differences as to social grade for DecTQs in general, whereas innit is associated with the lower grades.
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: a relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Axelsson, K. (2011). Tag questions in fiction dialogue. (PhD), University of Gothenburg, Göteborg.
Gómez-González, M. (2012). The question of tag questions in English and Spanish. In I. Moskowich & B. Crespo (Eds.), Encoding the past, decoding the future: corpora in the 21st century (pp. 59–97). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholarly Press.
Kimps, D. (2016). English variable tag questions: a typology of their interpersonal meanings. (PhD), KU Leuven, Leuven.
Krug, M. (1998). British English is developing a new discourse marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 23(2), 145–197.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017 fc). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3).
Palacios Martínez, I. M. (2015). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 383–405.
Pichler, H. (2013). The structure of discourse-pragmatic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Torgersen, E. N., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S., & Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–118.
Tottie, G., & Hoffmann, S. (2006). Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 34(4), 283–311.