Tag Questions in Early and Late Modern English: Historical Description and Theoretical Implications

Tag questions are a conspicuous feature of spoken Present-day English. In contrast to many other languages, where tags are generally realized by invariant forms (e.g. nicht wahr? in German, oder? in Swiss German, or n’est-ce pas? in French), the canonical English question tag is a reduced interrogative clause whose structure and lexical content is conditioned by the format of the anchor – or host – clause to which it is appended. It consists of a modal or an auxiliary verb, a pronoun (or there), and an optional negative particle (typically the enclitic n't). Its verb is either the operator of the anchor clause or – if no such operator is present – the dummy auxiliary DO; the pronoun is coreferential with the subject of the anchor clause. Furthermore, the polarity in the anchor clause and the tag can either be reversed (i.e. negative-positive or positive-negative) or constant (positive-positive or negative-negative). The different options are exemplified in sentences (1) to (4), which are taken from the British National Corpus: