Tag Question再考
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概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
Sentences containing constructions such as isn't it?, do you? were studied both theoretically and empirically, using data collected from fifteen children's novels written after 1950 by British, American and Australian authors. The study focused on syntax and intonation. First the data, 302 tag-questions, were classified into eight categories according to polarity and intonation, and their distributions found. Following this, the syntactic features of the tag-questions are described. Several major approaches to the treatment of the deep structure of tag-questions are introduced and discussed. It was found that the most appropriate approach is to presuppose compound sentences. That is to say, a declarative clause and a yes/no question for the reversed polarity falling-tone tag-question, and a declarative clause and a rhetorical question for the reversed polarity rising-tone tag-question. For the imperative sentence with a tag-question, it is also suggested that we presuppose a compound sentence with Imp as a pre-sentence sign. There are some restrictions on the use of auxiliaries in this construction. The syntactic analysis for the constant polarity tags will be treated in a subsequent paper. Then, the intonation of tag-questions was studied following the studies of J. D. O'Conner (1955) and A. Cruttenden (1986). These studies show how intonation affects the function of the tag in the context, and the profoundly important role tags play psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically.
- 東京女子大学の論文
- 1993-03-15