Idioma: Español
Fecha: Subida: 2021-04-14T00:00:00+02:00
Duración: 20m 03s
Lugar: Conferencia
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On the use of tag questions in Kenyan and Tanzanian English

Miriam Criado Peña (Universidad de Málaga)

Descripción

Tag questions in standard British English (BrE) follow a standard pattern consisting of an operator and a subject. This operator generally coincides with the preceding statement and rules of polarity are usually obeyed: negative tags are attached to positive statements and vice versa (i.e. the boat hasn’t left, has it?) (Quirk et al. 1985: 810). The new varieties of English seem to play an essential role in the development of this construction insofar as apparently no standard rule is observed. Some of these varieties have received special attention in the literature, Asian Englishes, in particular (Wong 2007; Borlongan 2008; Columbus 2010; Takahashi 2014; Criado-Peña 2016), whilst the use of the construction in the African varieties of English has been virtually neglected. Tag questions are still unexplored in East African English (EAfE) in spite of its linguistic distinctiveness and diversity. EAfE is composed of three varieties: Kenyan English (KenE), Tanzanian English (TznE), and Ugandan English (UgE), each of them having a different historical and sociolinguistic background, and thus making use of the language in different ways.
Given the linguistic richness of EAfE, the present paper investigates the use and distribution of tag questions in KenE and TznE. The polarity types of tag questions have also been examined by means of their categorization into four groups, including reversed and constant polarity tags: positive-negative, negative-positive, positive-positive and negative-negative tag questions and, in order to understand their meanings and functions, they have also been studied in terms of their pragmatic functions. Their analysis is interesting insofar as they are sometimes placed at different stages in the evolutionary process of New Englishes. According to Kachru’s Concentric Circles model (1986), the English of Kenya belongs to the “Outer circle” whereas the case of TznE is not clear-cut, mostly regarded as part of the “Outer circle”, although sometimes considered to be part of the “Expanding Circle”. In the light of this, the present paper has been conceived with the following objectives: a) to analyze the distribution of tag questions in EAfE and compare their use and features across the two varieties (i.e. KenE and TznE); b) to assess the frequency of the phenomenon across speech and writing, and across text types; and c) to study the polarity types of tags and to evaluate their pragmatic functions. For the purpose, the East African English component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) is used as source of analysis. Preliminary results point to a higher use of tag questions in KenE as well as a tendency towards the use of invariant tags in both varieties. The results also indicate that the two varieties present characteristic features especially in terms of the polarity and pragmatic functions of tags, with a preference for ‘attitudinal’ tags, mainly employed to emphasize the statement of the speaker without expecting any response.

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Congreso Cilc 2021

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Serie: CILC2021: Corpus y variación lingüística / Linguistic variation and change through corpora (+información)