Tag Questions in British and American English

TLDR

Tag questions such as “It’s raining, isn’t it?” illustrate the linguistic phenomenon under study. The study maps differences between British and American English in the use of canonical tag questions. The authors extracted thousands of tag questions from the BNC and LSAC, finding nine times more in colloquial British English than in American English. Findings show that tag polarity and operators differ between varieties, American English uses more facilitating tags, and older speakers use more canonical tags in both.

Abstract

This large-scale corpus study charts differences between British English and American English as regards the use of “canonical” tag questions such as It's raining, isn't it? It’s not raining, is it? or It’s raining, is it? Several thousand instances of question tags were extracted from the British National Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus, yielding nine times as many tag questions in colloquial British English as in colloquial American English (but also important register differences in British English). Polarity types and operators in tags also differ in the two varieties. Preliminary results concerning pragmatic functions point to a higher use of “facilitating” tags involving interlocutors in conversation in American English. Speaker age is important in both varieties, with older speakers using more canonical tag questions than younger speakers.