Similarities and Differences in the Pragmatic Functions of Tag Question in Oral Discourse and Fiction
Similarities and Differences in the Pragmatic Functions of Tag Question in Oral Discourse and Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on some similarities and differences in the distribution of pragmatic functions of tag questions in two types of discourse – oral face-to-face communication and author-created fictional dialogues. The discussion is based on comparing data from the spoken demographic subpart of the British National Corpus (BNC-SDEM), the Longman Spoken American Corpus (LSAK) with a similar corpus of tag questions in the narrow context of adjacency pairs excerpted from British and American fiction. Data analysis shows that almost all pragmatic functions identified in oral discourse are also widely represented in fiction, with a notable exception of the facilitating one. This difference is deemed indicative of the disparity between real-life oral conversation and its written counterpart represented in fiction. It also throws light on the importance of author’s remarks in interpreting pragmatic meaning in fiction. The results bear relevance to the role of positive and negative politeness in facilitating cooperative communication in the two main channels of communication.

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