earticle

영어

This study investigated question tags in world Englishes from a comparative perspective. A corpus analysis was conducted with the GloWbe to identify the forms and communicative functions of the commonly used question tags in inner-circle and outer-circle English-speaking countries. It revealed that the three most frequent positive tags are do you?, are you?, and would you?, and negative-positive balanced tags are more frequent than unbalanced ones. An in-depth analysis of the concordance lines indicates that unbalanced tags are primarily used for euphemistic, ironic, and confrontational effects. English speakers in the inner-circle countries tend to use would you? tags in imperative and argumentative situations while those in the outer-circle countries use them more often to make a request for confirmation and express encouragement in phatic communion. Furthermore, inner-circle speakers exhibit a tendency to use do you? and are you? tags to posit a proposition that presupposes the listener’s agreement, whereas in the outer-circle countries their usage contexts are preferentially associated with emphasis, oxymoron, and sarcasm.