Tag questionについての一考察

This paper investigates the tag question in context. It will examine the following: 1) the polarity between the statement and the tag; 2) the intonation of the tag; and 3) the underlying structure of the tag question. The data used for this study are 216 tag sentences collected from ten twentieth century British, American and Canadian children\u27s novels. Of the 216 tags 25 are what might be called "you" tags and "echo" tags. The intonation is that of two native speaking informants (one British and one American). First the data are classified into eight categories. The categories and the distribution of the tags are as follows:[table] The major findings are: 1) the rising intonation pattern is the most frequent; and 2) falling intonation with positive-positive polarity seems not to have been previously noted. There are no examples of negative-negative polarity with rising intonation, although this pattern has been attested by some linguists. The absence of any examples of negative-negative polarity with falling intonation helps confirm the suggestion by others that such a type is unknown. Then previous structural analyses of tag question are examined. The weaknesses of the early studies are mainly due to their assumption that tagged sentences derive from an underlying simple sentence. The recent work of Imai-Nakajima has postulated an underlying paratactic construction and seems more promising, but it has not yet provided a satisfactory explanation for some aspects of semantics and grammar. A clean-cut persuasive syntactic analysis of tag of falling intonation has not yet been achieved. The limitations of this study are; 1) the data are collected only from the twentieth century children novels, and 2) since the writer is not native, the analysis of intonation may lack intuitive understanding