This article examines the form and the functions of what we label overlapping reactions. These are premature responses which overlap utterances containing a variable interrogative tag, e.g., It’s nice, isn’t it. They are orientated towards the proposition contained in the tag question. Our research is grounded in a corpus of spoken British English and, employs methods and insights from corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and phonetics. Based on the clustering of observed grammatical, discoursal and prosodic features we propose a typology of the interactional functions of overlapping responses, i.e., acknowledgements, continuers, disagreements, non-committals and turn-competitive early responses. We show that such responses are not errors but rather function as part of the well-oiled machinery of spontaneous dialogue. We show that the typology of overlaps proposed by Jefferson ([1983]. “Two Explorations of the Organization of Overlapping Talk in Conversation.” Language and Literature 28: 1–33) is unable to fully distinguish between the functional categories identified in our data. Hence we suggest that a taxonomy of overlaps must be based on the patterning of formal and functional features. Our data provide evidence that tag questions are responded to a syntagmatic wholes rather than as a sequence of two parts: anchor and tag.

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This monograph deals with variable tag questions. These are utterances with a variable interrogative tag, like It's peculiar writing, isn't it, and the semi-variable tag innit, such as Nice, innit. The aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions. Compared to existing descriptions, the proposed typology is novel in three ways. Firstly, whereas almost all existing typologies are single-layered classifications, the functions of tag questions are categorized into two parallel dimensions of interpersonal meaning: the speech function and the stance layer. Secondly, semantic generalizations are proposed for clusters of grammatical, intonational and conversational properties. Thirdly, the bottom-up description is based on a sizeable amount of authentic, spontaneous conversations, which are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This paper studies from a synchronic-diachronic perspective the formal and semantic-discursive properties of adverbial expressions with a negative quantifier + wonder (henceforth ‘ no’ wonder ). They are used as mirative qualifiers which assess a proposition as ‘not surprising’, typically motivated by an explicit justification. As a result, the ‘no’ wonder adverbials function in a larger rhetorical structure, within which they convey the ‘causally justified expectedness’ of a state-of-affairs. We point out that in Present-day English, there are two types of ‘no’ wonder adverbials that are in different ways ‘outside of the clause’ they assess. On the one hand, there are disjunct uses of ‘ no’ wonder , which in our data always occur in sentence-initial position, scoping over the following proposition, with the justification either preceding or following the miratively qualified proposition. On the other hand, there is the anaphoric adverbial ‘no’ wonder , which retrospectively qualifies a proposition in a preceding clause or sentence, but is itself part of a separate complex containing the justification. We argue that historically these two adverbial subtypes are related to different multi-clausal patterns involving clauses with be + no wonder : disjuncts to extraposition constructions and anaphoric adverbials to clauses that qualify a preceding clause. We also show that in Present-day spoken data the anaphoric mirative qualifier is prosodically more independent, while the disjunct uses tend to be prosodically integrated with the proposition.

In this article we present functional-structural and information structure arguments for recognizing specificational there-clefts, i.e. clefts that specify a value for a variable. We distinguish two types which hinge on whether the matrix is a listing or a canonical existential. Listing there-clefts enumerate one or more instances as corresponding to the variable, e.g. You are quite right David, it was engineered, seems there's only me and you who can see this. Quantifying there-clefts indicate the quantity of instantiation of the variable, e.g. Look at the shape of it. There's only one thing that's that shape.

This article proposes a classification of speech functions of variable tag questions in British English conversations. Based on intonational, conversational and formal criteria the analysis shows that tag questions can not only function as questions and statements, but also as responses, commands and offers. A large group of tag questions cannot be captured by any of the traditional speech functions and are classified instead as Statement-Question blends. The article investigates the impact of the LLC and COLT corpora, and features such as gender, age and social roles, on the distribution of the different speech functions and their properties. The main finding is that all speech functions are present in the two different corpora, albeit with differing relative frequencies.

In this article we set out to develop a comprehensive description of the speech functions of tag questions (TQs) in British English dialogue. Our first aim is to outline a descriptive framework with the relevant semantic-pragmatic and formal features to capture all the speech functions fulfilled by TQs. Critical features to the classification of TQs into speech functions are: the commodity being exchanged (information or desired action), whether the TQ realizes an A-event, B-event or AB-event, and adjacency. Features that have typical correlations with the different speech function types are: intonation, polarity, clause type of the anchor, the presence of modals, the position of TQs in adjacency pairs and turns, and responses to TQs. Our second aim is to identify and typify the wide range of speech functions that TQs can realize. It turns out that real, information-seeking questions account for only a small portion of our TQ dataset. Most TQs express statement-question blends, but they can also convey pure statements, commands and offers, and even responses to a preceding question or statement. As the quantitative instantiation of categories is an intrinsic part of a usage-based description, we will examine the relative frequencies of the various speech functions and their properties in our dataset. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article deals with imperative constant polarity, tag questions (hence-forth imperative CPTQs) such as Leave me alone, will you and Let's have another, shall we. We propose a typology of imperative CPTQs on the basis of a systematic study of data, correlating their distinct formal properties with different contextualized uses. Further developing Mc-Gregor's (1997) general approach to tag questions, it e argue that the main subtypes of imperative,e CPTQs can be classified in terms of two interpersonal functions: illocutionary force and conduciveness. These two interpersonal dimensions form continua ranging from speaker-oriented to hearer-oriented meanings. The classification in terms of illocutionary force subsumes speaker-oriented command and request, speaker- and hearer-oriented proposal for joint action, and hearer-oriented advice and invitational offer. The corresponding conduciveness cline involves mainly 'softening' at the speaker-oriented end, where the speaker's desire predominates, and 'insisting' at the hearer-oriented end, which focuses on the benefits to the hearer.