Högskolan i Skövde

The aim of this article is to shed new light on the use and translation of English and Swedish questions in fiction by using a combination of parallel and comparable corpus data extracted from the bidirectional English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. In particular, the study examines questions containing a question mark (QMquestions) categorised into wh-interrogatives, polar interrogatives, alternative questions, tag questions (including those with invariant tags), declarative questions, wh-fragments and non-wh-fragments. The parallel analysis shows that most QMquestion types are more often translated congruently into English than into Swedish. The focus is on types with low mutual correspondence scores: fragments, tag questions and declarative questions. The comparable analyses concern both bilingual contrasts between the original texts and monolingual contrasts between the translation and original subcorpora in both languages. The bilingual analysis aligns with several preliminary findings in the parallel analysis, e.g. the favouring of tag questions and some types of wh-fragments in English. The monolingual analysis reveals both over- and underuse in translations and points to a strong effect of source-language influence. 

This paper deals with tag questions to which an answer is demanded by a speaker who is certain about the truth of the proposition but who wants to hear the answer uttered by the addressee. Similar tag questions have previously been described based on data from courtrooms (e.g. Biscetti 2006), where tag questions are typically used by powerful speakers. However, data from the British National Corpus shows that confirmation-demanding tag questions may also be used outside institutional settings and in situations with various power relationships. Most of these examples are from fiction dialogue, where conflicts and confrontations are often depicted. In courtrooms, there is always an audience; however, in fiction dialogue, most confirmation-demanding questions in the data are found in private conversations. Confirmation-demanding tag questions seldom seem to be captured in conversational data, apart from in cases where the speaker wants the answer to be heard by a third party; it is therefore suggested that private confrontations might be underrepresented in conversational data. This paper also discusses functional categorizations of tag questions in general and argues that the unit of analysis should be the whole tag question, i.e. the anchor and the tag taken together, and not just the tag.

This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how the use of such tags is restricted in relation to the preceding clause, the anchor. The focus is on a category labelled grammatically-dependent question tags (GDQTs). Earlier research has claimed that almost only English has such question tags, but this article presents and compares data on GDQTs from more than ten languages, and suggests a hierarchy for features of grammatical dependence in question tags: polarity < tense < number/person < (semantic) gender (possibly also < verb substitution). The GDQT structures vary in different ways: all GDQT languages have negative GDQTs, but not all have positive GDQTs; verb substitution is not always applied and constant polarity instead of reversed polarity is also found.