Tag questions in Hong Kong English: a corpus-based study

Abstract

This corpus-based study reports on a quantitative and qualitative account of the use of tag questions in Hong Kong English. About two hundred instances of question tags were extracted from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). Tag questions are more than nine times as frequent in spoken texts as in written texts. Hong Kong speakers of English tend to use disproportionately more positive-positive tag constructions (e.g., It’s pretty, is it?) than native English speakers, yielding a high error rate of tag question production. Is it? is used as a universal question tag. Results concerning pragmatic functions reveal a higher use of ‘confirmatory’ tags encouraging participation of speakers in conversation. The conclusion discusses possible pedagogical implications of the tendencies of tag questions in Hong Kong English.