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A Study of the Use of English Tag Questions according to Interactions of Social Variables

  • The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea
  • Abbr : 사회언어학
  • 2010, 18(1), pp.31-52
  • Publisher : The Sociolinguistic Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Linguistics

김혜숙 1

1건양대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 18(1). This large-scale corpus study examined the gender differences in the use of tag questions in terms of three different social variables: age, education and private/public situations. Seven hundred and fifty-three tag questions were extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), where social variables were parsed and tagged. Overall, women used a slightly higher number of tag questions: Out of the weighted 550 tag questions, men used 237 tag questions (43.1%) and women used 313 tag questions (56.9%). Among men, the number of tag questions increased with age while the number of tag questions decreased with age among women. The women in the 18-25 and 26-45 age brackets used more tag questions than the men in the same age brackets. But the women older than 45 used fewer tag questions than the men older than 45. Women with a secondary education used more tag questions than men with the same education. But both women and men with a tertiary education had about the same frequency of use of tag questions. In the private situations women used more tag questions than men while in the public situations men used more tag questions than women.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.