Right-dislocated pronouns in British English: the form and functions of ProTag constructions

Tags are widely acknowledged as being an important feature of colloquial British English. In this paper, I examine a type of tag that has to date received little attention in the literature beyond sociolinguistic research into its interpersonal functions: rightdislocated lone pronouns, or ProTags. Biber et al. (1999) acknowledge that the demonstrative pronoun that can be used as a right-dislocated tag in conversational British English, but corpus data reveal that other pronouns can also be used as ProTags. Based on a range of examples, primarily taken from large-scale corpora, I examine the form of the ProTag construction and its functions, comparing it with other tags used in British English, particularly question tags. In common with other tags, ProTags are a classic case of language conveying more than straightforward propositional content. I consider to what extent proposed analyses of the functions of tag questions carry over to ProTags, and briefly whether this construction has been a feature of British English for longer than might at first be assumed