been subjected to analysis from a corpus perspective, the use of tag questions1, as ..... 'Response' here is widely defined as an utterance which adresses the issue talked about in the .... I bet you'd be flabbergasted wouldn't you. B: Mm. A:.
Are tag questions questions? Evidence from spoken data Gisle Andersen University of Bergen 1.
Introduction
One of the main advantages of corpus-based studies of spoken data is that they enable us to test hypotheses about how conversation works. Our assumptions concerning the rules and principles that govern conversation may be based on introspection or on scattered evidence from individual samples, but the use of computerised and, by now, generally accessible corpora allows for systematic large-scale testing of these hypotheses, and for making generalisations on a broader basis. Much knowledge has been gained from corpus-based studies of specifically conversational phenomena, such as turn-taking, hedging, the use of discourse markers, backchannels and so on, studies which have increased our understanding of the principles that govern interaction and cooperation. In the current paper I wish to focus on one issue which to some extent has been subjected to analysis from a corpus perspective, the use of tag questions1, as exemplified by (1) and (2): (1)
(2)
B:
There’s thirty one days, thirty one days in November isn’t there? No thirty. (141906/13:90)
A: B:
You’ll need patience for fishing won’t you? Yeah. (BDKBH/4148)
A:
It is widely acknowledged that tag questions serve important pragmatic functions in conversation, and in the literature it is common to distinguish between two broad categories of use. They can be used with an epistemic function to mark the speaker’s lack of commitment towards a proposition, to express the speaker’s uncertainty, as seems to be the case in (1), or they can be used with a more general politeness function, in cases where there is no uncertainty involved, as in (2). Tags of the latter type are said to contribute to positive politeness (Brown & Levinson 1978), and they are a means of bringing the hearer into the discourse. The term ‘facilitative’ (Coates 1988; Holmes 1995) is often used to refer to this type, which underlines their role as devices for facilitating talk. Janet Holmes (1995) points out that one should take the functional properties of tag questions into account if one wishes to make a quantitative comparison of the extent to which different speaker groups use tag questions. There are also other, less common uses of tags, such as the aggressive or hostile tags, which may, in fact, be humiliating rather than polite (cf Millar & Brown
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1979; Algeo 1988; Cameron et al 1988). However, rather than focusing on functional properties, I wish to consider tag questions from a different perspective. My focus is on two issues which are more rarely addressed in the literature on tags, namely the question of response elicitation and variation across generations. If we consider the previous literature on tag questions, the underlying assumption invariably seems to be that the point of using a tag question is to elicit something from a hearer, in the manner shown in examples (1) and (2). It is usually claimed that tags are, in and off themselves, aimed at triggering a verbal contribution from the hearer, specifically, a contribution which either confirms or rejects the claim that is made in the previous proposition (ie in the preceding referentially meaningful unit). Typically, utterances containing tag questions are positively conductive, which means that the expected response is a confirmatory one. Quirk et al, for instance, claim that an utterance containing a tag question generally ‘asserts something then invites the listener’s response to it’ (1985:811), and according to Holmes ‘tag questions are generally aimed at eliciting a response, however minimal, from the addressee’ (1982:44). More recently she claims that they ‘encourage people to talk’ and ‘invit(e) the adresse’s participation in the discourse’ (Holmes 1995:86). It is of course reasonable to assume that there is a fairly close connection between the use of a tag question and a speaker’s intention to elicit a response, given that tags are interrogative in form, and that they have a certain capacity, at least, to perform directive speech acts (ie speech acts of ‘asking’, as shown in (1); cf Searle 1969). Given the Gricean principle that as a speaker you should ‘make your contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs’ (Grice 1975:45), we would expect, assuming that speakers cooperate, that they do give (confirmative) feedback to utterances containing tag questions. The beauty of corpora of spoken English is that they enable us to test the effect of this principle in naturally occuring conversations. The aim of the current paper is to test empirically the response-elicitation effect of tag questions in two corpora of spoken English and, on the basis of quantitative data, assess whether the response-eliciting function of tag questions is a salient one. The incentive to carry out such an investigation came from preliminary observations that, in teenage conversation, tag questions are often used in contexts where it does not appear to be the speaker’s intention to try to make the hearer confirm the claim that is being made or to ask for his opinion. I therefore wish to study tag questions quantitatively and to address the issue of response elicitation on a general basis, by also considering how tag questions are used in adult talk. The comparison between teenage and adult talk is an important byproduct of the current investigation, and a subsidiary aim is to focus on distributional differences with respect to the use of tag questions. The investigation is based on The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), a 500,000 word corpus of informal conversations between teenagers in the London area. For comparison, I have looked at a specifically designed subset of the British National Corpus (henceforth labelled
Are tag questions questions?
3
BNC/London), extracted from from its spoken demographic part. This extract is approximately the same size as COLT and the speakers are adults from the Greater London area. Several factors motivated my choice of using this extract rather than searching in the entire BNC. Due to the time consuming nature of the syntactic and pragmatic analysis this study involves, it was reasonable to restrict the total amount of data. The two corpora constitute comparable sets of data because they are equal in size and geographical distribution. In addition, it was advantageous that the same search tool (TACTweb) could be applied. 2.
Theory and method
Before addressing the issue of response elicitation, some words of caution are called for. First, the figures presented below are based on tape recordings and the transcriptions of these. What counts as responses, then, is restricted to overt expressions of agreement or disagreement, but we cannot rule out the possibility that tag questions were responded to by means of a non-verbal or inaudible signal, for instance a gesture. Therefore the number of tags which were analysed as response eliciting may be lower than what was actually the case. A second and perhaps more substantial problem is that one should ideally distinguish between tags that are intended to elicit a response and those that actually elicit a response. In conversation and other types of communication, speakers always have certain intentions regarding the effects of the utterances they produce, but the intention of a desired effect does not necessarily imply successful achievement of that effect. Specifically, a speaker may well intend her utterance to trigger a response, but it is by no means certain that the hearer recognises this intention, let alone that he opts for a verbal response. From a speech act perspective, utterances that are intended to elicit responses can be seen as directive speech acts. And if a speaker who produces an utterance containing a tag question intends it to be a directive speech act, ie one which is aimed at eliciting a response, then her success in doing so involves (at least) the following four requirements (felicity conditions): • • • •
Speaker’s intention. The speaker S intends by her utterance U to perform an illocutionary act of asking whether P. Locutionary act. S uses verbal and/or non-verbal means to produce an U which is recognisable as a directive speech act. Recognition of illocutionary act. The hearer H comprehends U and recognises S’s intention. Hearer’s cooperation. H is cooperative, and is capable of and willing to respond to U.
In everyday conversation, the interaction may fail at any of these points. Consequently, the absence of a response in the data does not necessarily mean that the utterance was not intended to elicit a response, a point which may be illustrated quite nicely by the following example:
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(3)
See, I’m a nice bloke aren’t I? ... She doesn’t answer. (139704/1:23)
Arguably, the occurrence of an explicit response may be taken as evidence that the utterance was intended as a response elicitor, but lack of such is not necessarily evidence to the contrary. And, needless to say, the only thing that corpora enable us to identify with confidence are the actual responses. Identification of the utterances where a response was intended but not obtained is a much more dodgy task. Before considering the actual results, it is worthwhile to make a methodological point concerning the retrieval of tag questions. Due to the lack of an efficient method for the automatic retrieval, the task of identifying relevant tokens proved to be time-consuming. I searched for all collocations of finite verb forms and pronominal subjects which could potentially involve tag questions, such as didn’t + he, hasn’t + they, are + we and so on. The searching included conceivable (highly formal) non-contracted tags, such as did they not and might I not, of which there were none in COLT and only a handful in BNC/London. It also included potential non-standard realisations of tags, such as weren’t he, weren’t she, don’t she, ain’t I etc. Finally, I had to disregard all those occurrences of these collocations that were not tags but other types of interrogatives, before the actual analysis of response elicitation. 3.
Findings and discussion
The most striking observation that can be extracted from the data is the fact that tag questions are primarily a feature of adult conversation, as can be seen from Table 1: Table 1. Canonical tag questions in COLT and BNC/London COLT (teenagers) BNC (adults)
tag questions 888 2463
per 1000 words 1.748 5.199
The statistics include only the so-called ‘canonical tag questions’ (Holmes 1982), ie tag questions which consist of an operator and a personal pronoun (aren’t they, do we, can I etc). These are about three times as frequent in adult talk as in teenage talk. This is an important observation which will tentatively be accounted for in section 4. The difference in distribution of canonical tags across the two corpora must be seen in connection with teenagers’ apparent preference for the invariant tags, which are not included in the statistics of Table 1. Invariant tags are items like eh, okay, yeah, right, etc, used as tags (cf Berland 1997) and the notorious innit, a combination of ain’t/isn’t + it which is used as an invariant in COLT (cf Stenström & Andersen 1996). As regards the issue of response elicitation, the data partly confirm and partly disagree with the assumption that tags are meant to elicit talk.
Are tag questions questions?
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Table 2. Turn placement of tags in COLT and BNC/London COLT Turn-initial Turn-medial Turn-final BNC Turn-initial Turn-medial Turn-final
n
n
5 227 656 15 608 1840
%
%
0.6 25.6 73.9 0.6 24.7 74.7
First of all, we note from Table 2 that tags in both corpora are primarily turnfinal.2 As a rule, the use of a tag question co-occurs with the termination of a speaker’s turn. Tags tend to be turn-yielding, ie they occur at the point where the speaker allows for someone else to take over the floor. This is, of course, as we would expect, since tag questions are assumed to be facilitators of the talk of others. And there is no variation between adult and teenage talk in this respect. On the contrary, the percentages for turn placement are remarkably similar in the two corpora. (For discussion of turn-medial and turn-initial tags, see the end of the current section.) However, if we consider the nature of the utterance following the tag question, we notice that the two corpora differ significantly: Table 3. Response elicitation of tags in COLT and BNC/London COLT Verbal response (positive, negative or dunno) No verbal response BNC Verbal response No verbal response
n 349 533 n 1352 964
% 39.6 60.4 % 58.4 41.6
As regards the BNC data, it is in fact true that tag questions are generally followed by a response which confirms or rejects the claim that the speaker makes (ie as an ‘answer’ to the question the tag was used to ask). This was the case in a majority of about 60 per cent of the c. 2500 examples. This shows that adults generally conform with the principle that tags should be responded to by means of a confirmation or a rejection. In teenage talk this is different. In fact, the opposite pattern can be observed, in that teenagers respond by means of a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, or similar, in only about 40 per cent of the cases. The most common patterns of use, then, can be exemplified by the following examples:
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Adult talk (4) A: B: Teenage talk (5) A: B:
She doesn’t know what to buy, she might as well buy something useful mightn’t she? Yes it’s true. (BDKD0:2547) You’re just like, you’re using her aren’t you? How many pages did you do for maths project? (141803/9:31)
In both varieties the tags are typically turn-yielding. In adult talk, the impending utterance generally contains a confirmation, but in teenage talk, the impending utterance may just as well involve a topic shift. At this point, it is necessary to describe what counts as a response. ‘Response’ here is widely defined as an utterance which adresses the issue talked about in the previous proposition, and confirms or rejects it or expresses an inability to confirm or reject. In such contexts the tag question can be said to contribute due to its interrogative form and directive illocutionary force to the elicitation of the upcoming/impending utterance. Incidentally, confirmation is the most common response, and amounts to about 85 per cent of the total responses in both corpora. Rejection and so-called ‘disclaims’ (expressions of inability to confirm/reject, cf Stenström 1994) amount in BNC/London to about 12 per cent and 3 per cent, respectively. (The corresponding percentages for COLT are c. 14 % and 0 %.) A wide variety of forms may be used to confirm or reject a claim and are reported as responses in Table 3. A convenient classification may be the following: Minimal responses: yeah, yes, mm, right etc (6) A: you have to get back by train won’t you, obviously. yeah (141604/7:211) B: Repetition of entire proposition (7) A: You’re not open on Saturday are you? We’re closed Saturday. (139705/1:77) B: Elliptical repetition of proposition (8) A: She wouldn’t do that would she? She would. (140801/2:81) B: Repetition of propositional element (9) A: You’re almost fluent in English aren’t you? Almost. (142601/2:151) B: (Near-) synonymous expression (10) A: But that’s really quite quite bad, isn’t it? Dreadful, poor parents. (141201/1:11) B:
Are tag questions questions?
Implicature (11) A: B:
7
Her father’s got money hasn’t he? They’ve all got money. (136902/6:74) (Implicature: yes, confirmation)
(12)
A: B:
Never phone her do you? Can’t be bothered. (133203/11:8) (Implicature: no, confirmation)
(13)
A: B:
You missed a lot did you? Only the first lesson, which is ... (137903/8:49) (Implicature: no, rejection)
Responses expressing reduced commitment/uncertainty (14) A: But you never used to hang around with her though, did you? B: Well, sort of. (140602/23:14) (15)
A: B:
Well that’s Russell isn’t it? Yeah I suppose it is. (142002/9:146)
The list of responses includes both utterances that contain an explicit affirmative or non-affirmative answer and utterances which ‘in effect’ count as a yes or a no. It is fairly common, especially in adult talk, to respond by means of an utterance whose implicature communicates an affirmative or non-affirmative response. For instance, B’s response in (11) logically implies that ‘his father’s got money’; ie it counts as an affirmation of the propositional claim. In (12) the response communicates a standard Gricean implicature (Grice 1975, 1989). The utterance provides an explanation for the negative answer it implies; ie it involves a violation of the relevance maxim. The response in (13) must be taken as a negative response because it adresses the issue asked about and expresses that ‘a lot’ is not an appropriate description of the amount the hearer missed. The list is not meant to be exhaustive; there are many other subtle ways of providing implicit responses to tag questions. Description and classification of these is beyond the scope of this paper. Common to all the examples of this survey is that they constitute genuine adjacency pairs (Question-Response) whose second constitutent, the response part, must be interpreted in light of the first one, and it is fairly obvious that the tag question contributes, by means of its interrogative properties and its illocutionary force, to the elicitation of the response. Despite this fairly wide notion of response, we note that tag questions are generally not responded to in the teenage data (60 %), and are surprisingly often not responded to in the adult data (40 %). These findings seem to justify my concern that the role of tag questions as response-eliciting devices and facilitators of talk, which has been emphasised in previous studies, may be somewhat exaggerated, particularly if we consider teenage conversations.
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Does this mean that speakers generally fail in their attempts at triggering a verbal contribution when they use tags? In my opinion, no. I wish to suggest that, in a great many cases, we cannot associate the use of a tag question with an actual attempt at response elicitation, despite what is claimed in the previous literature. The data suggest that, in a fairly large number of cases, it is not the speaker’s intention to allow for a response from somebody or to exit from the turn. Table 2 above showed that it is quite common that tags occur within a turn (c. 25 % in both corpora). This type of use can be exemplified as follows: (16)
Basically yeah. I mean it’s not like that important is it? I mean I already do enough ex= enough exercise. It’s li= I can’t run or anything. (140504/1:234)
(17)
That’s where he lives, that’s his house that’s his house, doesn’t sound like a house does it? but that’s the name of his home, yeah, here you are er make a copy ... (140701/4:124)
(18)
I’m not gonna be here Friday Saturday Sunday or Monday am I cos I’ve got this holiday right but I’m gonna come here on Tuesday (140505/1:38)
If we consider these tags from the point of view of their prosody3, we note that a common pattern is that the tags are not followed by any substantial silent pause. Judging by the recordings, it is frequently not the speaker’s intention to exit from the turn at the point where the tag occurs, as the tag may commonly occur in the midst of a continous and fairly rapid flow of speech, particularly if a speaker is engaged in enthusiastic storytelling. A common pattern for turn-medial tags is that the speaker continues without allowing the hearer to express his view or to confirm or reject the claim. Hence, these examples are not cases of failure to elicit a verbal contribution; it is simply not the speaker’s intention to attempt to do so. The turn-medial (non-turn-yielding) tags exemplified by (16)-(18) are not facilitative in the strict sense introduced by Coates (1988): Addressee-oriented tags can be used either to soften the force of a negatively affective utterance, or to facilitate interaction. … Facilitative tags are given this name precisely because they are used to facilitate the participation of others; they invite them into the discourse. (Coates 1988:115) After this description, which clearly emphasises the role of tags as facilitators of a verbal contribution from the hearer, Coates goes on to describe examples which counter the very assumption that this is their primary role. In fact, she presents precisely the type of turn-medial tags as illustrated in (16)-(18). She argues that these are nevertheless facilitative, but fails to state explicitly what it means to ‘facilitate interaction’ if it does not imply overt hearer-contribution. Although the prime function of many turn-medial tags is clearly not that of reponse elicitation, the interactional meanings of turn-medial tags must not be underestimated. I wish to argue that this type of tag functions as a generalised
Are tag questions questions?
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‘empathiser’, an item which ‘involves the listener’ in Anna-Brita Stenström’s (1994:44) terminology. But the notion of conversational empathy should not be restricted to the elicitation of overt contributions in the discourse. These tags must be described in terms of the speaker’s willingness to take the hearer’s perspective in communication. Regardless of their formal properties (eg turn placement), tag questions have a capacity for taking the hearer’s cognitive background into account and keeping open the discourse channel between the interlocutors. In cognitive terms (Sperber & Wilson 1986), the empathiser is a means of bringing into focus assumptions that are believed to be shared by speaker and hearer, and to set in motion the negotiation of common ground (Jucker & Smith 1998). It is also a means of underlining the hearer’s presence and acknowledging his potential participation at the current or later stage in the ongoing conversation. The observation that turn-medial use is as frequent as about 25 per cent in both corpora (cf Table 2) shows that we have good reasons for claiming that tag questions are often used for other purposes than response elicitation, and ought to be described in more general terms. However, it should be pointed out that turnmedial tags can occasionally involve a response, for instance if the tag occurs between items that are constituents of the same clause, as in (19): (19)
A: B:
He got knackered, did he, by the mousetrap? Yeah. (141201/17:214)
A’s utterance appears to be a genuine attemt to get B to respond, and the tag (and the rising intonation) contributes to the elicitation of the response. I consider this an example of a tag that is both turn-medial and turn-yielding. This is a marginal category, and the most usual pattern, by far, is that the turn-medial tags are not turn-yielding, in the manners illustrated in (16)-(18). The statistics in Table 2 also show that tags sometimes occur turn-initially. This may come as a surprise, given that a tag is usually something which is tagged onto a directly preceding statement. But sometimes there may be intervening material or a long break between a proposition and its tag, and the tag may come as an afterthought, as in (20): (20)
A: B: C: A: B:
You might even be allowed to bath, her or him? Him. Him. Michael. Mightn’t you? Mhm. Yeah. (BDKC0/5546)
(21)
A: B: A:
I bet you’d be flabbergasted wouldn’t you. Mm. Wouldn’t you though if somebody came up and ( mentioned) (137201/16:199)
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Sometimes a speaker may repeat the tag as the initial element of the next turn. This is what happens in (21), where it is clearly not the speaker’s intention to elicit a response by means of the turn-initial tag. 4.
Cross-generational variation
I would now like to return to the observation mentioned earlier, that canonical tag questions are primarily a feature of adult talk, where they are three times as frequent as in teenage talk. Why such a difference? 4.1
Age grading: tags as facilitators
First, this difference must be seen in light of the observation, made by Janet Holmes (1995), that tags, due to their facilitative potential, tend to be used by people who have some sort of responsibility for the success of an interaction, eg leaders of meetings, teachers in a classroom, interviewers on TV, radio, hosts at parties, etc. It will seem that this is a kind of responsibility which adults are more willing and inclined to undertake than teenagers are. The observations made in the current study suggest that this is an aspect of communicative competence that is learnt at a relatively late stage in a person’s life. Such an interpretation would imply that the difference in distribution is a result of age-grading rather than linguistic change. Indeed, my impression from considering these two sets of data is that tags tend to cluster in conversations where a teacher speaks to her pupils or where parents speak to their children. A more detailed study that distinguishes between different types of conversation within the corpora would be required in order to provide more reliable evidence for this assumption. 4.2
Age grading: the complexity of canonical tag questions
A second possible explanation for this difference is that the inflectional system of canonical tag questions in English is rather complex and requires much greater production effort that the use of invariant tags, such as eh, okay, right, yeah, and the invariant innit. It may be, then, that teenagers opt for the invariant forms due to their simplicity, and that they venture into the domain of syntactically complex tags at a relatively late stage of their development as users of the language. In other words, the difference may be an example of age-grading which is due to the syntactic complexity of canonical tag questions. As mentioned, my data seem to support such an explanation, in that those forms that can be used as invariant tags, okay, yeah, right and alright are more frequent in COLT than in the BNC extract. In particular, it seems that yeah (pronounced with rising intonation) is used as an invariant tag to a much greater extent in COLT than in BNC/London:
Are tag questions questions? (22)
11
All it is yeah, is a project yeah that six peo= me and other five other people yeah in the school were asked to do yeah for a university which is studying ch= erm children’s language, yeah and what it’s like and basically I’ve got to carry it on me for a weekend yeah, record loads of different conversations on ten different tapes. (133701/1:76)
Perhaps even more noticable is the tendency for teenagers to use the form innit as an invariant tag, ie a tag which occurs in all syntactic contexts, not just third person singular (Stenström & Andersen 1996; Andersen 1997). These tendencies are reflected in the follwing table: Table 4. Some potential invariant tags in COLT and BNC/London eh? okay? yeah? right? alright? innit? COLT 21 865 7446 1775 841 311 BNC 30 517 3874 1008 517 106* (* not an invariant in BNC/London, ie only used in 3rd p sg contexts) With the exception of eh?, all of these forms are more frequent in teenage than adult talk, and the difference is particularly great with respect to yeah. It should be noted, however, that Table 4 contains raw figures only and therefore include other elements than tags. In other words, a more fine-grained analysis is required in order to confirm that teenagers use the forms okay, yeah, right and alright as invariant tags more often than adults do. Table 4 nevertheless suggest an interesting tendency, which to some extent is supported by Berland’s (1997) findings. It should also be pointed out that this cross-generational variation is not in itself evidence of teenagers’ preference of syntactically simpler forms. It may well be that an explanation for teenagers’ preference for the invariant tags can be found is associated with the stylistic features or the social meanings and solidarity-marking potential of invariant tags. 4.3
Linguistic development
We have seen that there is some evidence that teenagers prefer the invariant tags to the canonical system. From this we may speculate whether this difference is a case of an ongoing language change whereby the canonical system is giving way to a simpler system where speakers use invariant forms. Although my data could suggest such a development, it is far to early to say whether such a development is actually taking place in present-day London English.
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5.
Concluding comment
In addition to the age-specific variation discussed above, the current study has shown that tags are more rarely responded to in teenage talk than in adult talk. However, we should be careful not to take this observation as evidence that teenagers are generally less cooperative than adults. Teenage conversations do constitute coherent units despite the fact that tags are not responded to. What is suggested by these data is that conversational cooperation is realised by different means across different generations, not that teenagers are less willing to cooperate or that they are careless or rude. Both adult and teenage interaction are constrained by principles of cooperation and politeness, but the means by which politeness and hearer involvement are achieved seem to differ. At any rate, it appears that we have a lot to learn concerning conversational phenomena from a corpus-based comparison across the generations.
Notes 1
The terms ‘tag’ and ‘tag question’ are used interchangeably in this paper; ie there is no formal or functional differences between the two, nor are they intended to indicate a difference in illocutionary force or capacity for response elicitation.
2
It should be pointed out that this is not an entirely strict classification. Specifically, tags that are considered utterance-final may occasionally be followed by another non-propositional element, for instance a vocative, as in I’m not that thick am I Jock? or a pragmatic marker, as in He’s not exactly, an oil painting himself is he though?. I nevertheless consider these tags ‘turn-final’ in virtue of not being followed by a propositional constituent or another proposition. For descriptions of turn-initial and turnmedial tags, see the discussion of examples (16) through (21).
3
Prosodic analysis could only be applied to the COLT examples, since the BNC recordings were not available.
References Algeo, J. (1988), ‘The tag question in British English: it’s different, i’n’it?’, English World-Wide, 9:2: 171-191. Andersen, G. (1997), ‘I goes you hang it up in your shower, innit? He goes yeah. The use and development of invariant tags and follow-ups in London teenage speech’. Paper given at 1st Language Variation Workshop, Reading, April 1997.
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Berland, U. (1997), ‘Invariant tags: Pragmatic functions of innit, okay, right and yeah in London teenage conversation’. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Bergen. Brown, P. & S. Levinson (1987), Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D., F. McAlinden & K. O’Leary (1988), ‘Lakoff in context: the social and linguistic function of tag questions’, in Coates, J. & D. Cameron (eds.), Women in their speech communities. London: Longman, 74-93. Coates, J. (1988), ‘Gossip revisited: language in all-female groups’, in Coates, J. & D. Cameron (eds.), Women in their speech communities. London: Longman, 94-122. Grice, H. P. (1975), ‘Logic and conversation’, in Cole, P. & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 5: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press, 41-58. Grice H. P. (1989), Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Holmes, J. (1982), ‘The functions of tag questions’, English language research journal, 3: 40-65. Holmes, J. (1995), Women, men and politeness. London: Longman. Jucker, A. H. & S. W. Smith (1998), ‘And people just you know like ‘wow’: discourse markers as negotiating strategies’, in Jucker, A. & Y. Ziv (eds.), Discourse markers: descriptions and theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 171-201. Millar, M. & K. Brown (1979), ‘Tag questions in Edinburgh speech’, Linguistische Berichte 60:24-45. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik (1985), A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Searle, J. R. (1969), Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D & D. Wilson. (1986), Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stenström, A-B & G. Andersen (1996), ‘More trends in teenage talk: a corpusbased investigation of the discourse items cos and innit’, in: C. Percy, C. Meyer & I. Lancashire (eds.), Synchronic corpus linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 189-203. Stenström, A-B. (1994), An introduction to spoken interaction. London: Longman.
