The Use Of Tag Questions with Male and Female Speakers of English and Serbian

Abstract

The paper is a report on research meant to discover the extent to which the speakers of English and Serbian employ tag questions as communicative strategies for ensuring pragmatic agreement and increasing the tentativeness of a speech act regarding the role of gender therein. This small-scale contrastive research project, largely inspired and founded on the specificities of gendered discourse style as identified by R. Lakoff (1975, 2004), and later discussed by Holmes (1986), Romaine (2003), Talbot (2003), Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2003) and others, is based on analyzing contextualized question-tagging sampled from a corpus of texts within the journalistic register. The corpus encompasses 100 interviews provided by English and Serbian male and female interviewees from on-line newspapers and magazines. The analysis also addresses such issues as how culturally-conditioned or gender-conditioned tag-question usage is, whether a fixed form of question tagging would be less productive a pattern than the variable form, etc.