Tag questions and gender: Project
Introduction
The following is an outline of a number of questions that could be asked while putting together an investigation into tag questions.
Read the extract by Robin Lakoff in Language and gender: an advanced resource book (J.Sunderland, Routledge, 2006) which is reproduced in the handout at the bottom of this page.
In this extract, Lakoff makes a number of points about how men and women use tag questions. There seems little dispute about the grammatical form of a tag question - an interrogative tagged onto the end of a declarative – but what is more open to interpretation is the meaning and use of this feature.
Project
To begin with, we can use data from a corpus, i.e. a large database of authetic spoken and written text materials. One such corpus is the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB; for more information, click here). We can use software to find tag questions in ICE-GB and then ask the question 'Do women use more tag questions than men'?
Step 1: A search for TAGQ (tag question) in the British Component of the International Corpus of English yields:
Total hits: 757
Spoken: 722
Written: 35
- Why would there be tag questions in written texts?
- What reasons might there be for discarding the written results?
Tag questions in written texts are likely to occur in passages of dialogue in fiction. Fictional dialogue can often represent stereotypes of male and female speech – even naturalistic dialogue can be quite inaccurate.
Step 2: Discarding written examples and narrowing the search criteria down by looking for examples uttered by females and males, we get:
Spoken tag questions uttered by females = 296 (41%)
Spoken tag questions uttered by males = 426 (59%)
So, according to these numbers, men use more tag questions than women in ICE-GB.
- How can we find out if this is true? In other words, do we perhaps need more information to establish that men use more tag questions than women? What information would that be?
- What else do we need to know?
We would need to know how many utterances were spoken by men and women in the entire corpus. We’d need to know the relative proportion of tag questions to utterances where a tag question might have been used. We’d also need to think about subclasses of spoken data, for example if particular types of conversation encourage more tag question use (classroom talk, etc).
Step 3: Narrowing down the variables. Can we search for different examples uttered by men and women taking their level of education into account? If we do so, the results are as follows:
Number of tag questions uttered by females with secondary education = 85
Number of tag questions uttered by females with university education = 170
What about the missing 41? Perhaps they are mixed conversations.
Step 4: Zoom in to one extract to find out more detail.
An interesting example might be S1A-009:
2 speakers: 1 male, 1 female.
Male uses no tags; female uses 10.
What does this tell us about male/female conversation styles?
Can we generalise from this?
Examples of those 10 tag questions are here (click on the '+'-symbol to enlarge):
Extension project
Read text S1A-020 from ICE-GB, shown below (click on the '+'-symbol to enlarge).
I met a girl on the train today
Oh (.)
You picked up a girl on the train
I did not pick her up
I met her
SorryUh you met a girl on the train
What s the difference between meeting and picking up
Well she s not here (1)
Oh I see
[?...?]
I met her and
You picked her up and dropped her did you
Picked her up and dropped her yeah
Only to pick her up againI hope (.)
Oh well if you ve got her telephone number you picked her up
Did you get her telephone number
I got her phone number
Oh well you picked her up [?...?] it all yes (1)
You picked her up
Uhm I m sorry everybody thenit looks like that was a definite pick-up then (.)
What sort of a girl is she
Well
Is she Chinese
No she s English
She s the first English girl I ve spoken to for about three or four years I thinkA very strange feeling
It s an English girlYes quite
What sort of English girl
Very very frightening [?...?] saying
but she
[?...?]
Oh absolutely and you know so much about them
Yeah
Even more frightening than knowing they can understand what you re saying
That s what I said
Oh I see I thought you said it was very frightening being able to understand what they were saying
Yes they know too much about
Yes
Uhm (.)
Yes the English are branded on their tongue as they say dont they so uh as soon as you speak you know they usually know what an idiot you are
So this one was (.) lower middle-class in that case
In Chinese I know even more
But what about A one B two (1) as grouping uhmI d say she was probably a B two (.) or maybe a B one
UhmPity (.)
She s a student at Saint Martin s I think
Is she
Uhm (1)
B one means she s pretty sort ofAre you talking about appearance now
No
How would you go about uh her
On appearance
This is class evidently
Class class
Uh start with class
three-or-four-wordsYes right
That s right isnt it
Yes yes so that s it
Yes yes that s right
We were estimating her income
I mean if she s a student at Saint Martin s she would presumably be covered
No no but I m saying if she hadMichael s so [?...?] [?...?] accent and so on
attention
It s what she earns
Her parents get
Yeah
Yes oneuh and appearance
Appearances dont go A one and A twoIt goes on a scale from one to ten (laugh)
Right
Where was she
And she is four and a half five (1)That s pretty good
I ve heard that s very good and uh uh
it s very hard
Not bad
Uh uh uh what do you mean below half way down the ratings
Yeah just (.)
There s a very severe judge this
I should imagine he is yes yes
Nobody here is above eight
Being one of the beautiful people himself he uh has these high standards (1)Anybody that s got an eye each side of their nose and can walk around to me is a tremendous beauty he says (1)
[?...?]
that s
Anyway anyway anyway Louis tell us more about her
I dont know much about herI ve got her phone number right hereThe thing is what s the etiquette of this
You re then meant to wait a couple of days before you ring them up or else it appears uncool you know
[?...?]
Ring her tomorrow and invite her out
Just say I happen to be going to the theatre and I have two tickets
Credit line
Is that all I say
Yeah
Well there s
Dont ask me what you sayYou re the expert at this
there s the strike while the iron is hot policy (.)And there is the other policy adopted by a friend of mine who always lets thirteen days pass
Thirteen days he calculated would as it were just allow such expectations like boredom with it uhm melt into a vague disappointment (1)So [?...?] however attractive she was he counted off thirteen days and then rang her
[?...?]
Yeah
[?...?]
I would be afraid that in three days she d have forgotten all about me let alone thirteen (.)
Ah you seethe danger is uhm he s not like Louis of course and more like me a sort of person that would find it hard to uh be attractiveso if (1) he always felt that he d
This good-spirited
Person d be intrigued by the thirteen day gapShe d be so confident she d got him
that he d ring
she would hesitate whether to [?] him
Uhm
Uhm
But that sounds as uh he was slightly blasé[?] [?] (.)
Do you want to appear blasé
I dont know (.)
Ring her tomorrow
Can you appear blaséDo you think that someone from this particular socioeconomic group (1)
Uh don I dont know
Or is she so used to that (1) that the sort of direct D three approach might be more effective you know so (.)
She s sitting there at this very moment saying why doesnt he ring me at this moment (.)
Yes of course
If you rang her now she d say yes LouisI bet you ten quid on itI mean it
I hope she doesnt work at this institute (1) or this institute
There s the plot of a novel there (.)
Not quite
There is a novel
Or a short story
There is a short story
A crime novelIt d be a murder story (1)
I think there s a Barbara Cartland romance actually (1)Four and a half he called me she quavered (1)Surely it couldnt have been him from lake thirty-five (1)
Yes (1)
Can I set it in Regency times (.)I d have the equivalent of a stage coach or something (1)
Dont think their picking up was quite the same was it (.)
I mean it
What do they doI dont know I mean
Well I mean say eighteenth century relationships between men and women were very different because if it was a low class womanand we have a precedent from Boswell s London Journal (.) where he comes out of Saint Paul s Cathedral after being elevated by a very fine sermon and determined to better his life but unfortunately meets a trollop at the bridge (.) and then goes home regretting that he had not brought a sheath with him and fearing they were going to be
Uhm (laughter)if I remember Boswell s London Journal he almost invariably does
Yes he s endlessly getting
Has thirty days on mercury curesthree-or-four-words very painful for
That s rightStraight after the Dean s sermon as well
Yes uhm (.)God it must ve been awful in those days
Well yeah (1)How would you arrange these things without a telephoneI was wondering that (1)
What did they do
I think people moved in a much smaller circle then in those days thoughI dont know what they did
UhmWell they dropped cards in I suppose the doorsOr was that nineteenth century
Wonder what people do now
I think that s more nineteenth century
Uhm (1)
How did men arrange to be with women whether they were unmarried or married (.)Below them I mean
Who knows
Cos they did didnt theythere was certain intimacy in the eighteenth centuryPeople were in
Johnson certainly uh sat with Mrs Thrale a long time and whatever in intimate conversations (1)
Uhm
It was more like now than the nineteenth century was
three-or-four-words
Uhm I think the nineteenth
Well it depends very much again what class you were in and (1)
TheAnd where you were
It would be the equivalent of talking to a girl on the stage between Dover and London (1)
But I dont (.)It s difficult to imagine people (1) picking women up and
I think yeah (.)You get a bit [?...?] these daysOh I know where we wereDickensNow Dickens setting his uh Tale of Two Cities has the meeting of the I forget the name of the girl or the manindeed so uh probably boring both of them uhm charactersUh the Frenchman who marries the doctor s daughter
I know yes yes
Now they meet on the packet sailing from England dont theyAnd all Dickens says that he called on the doctorAnd I think that was the etiquette
You called on the man (.) and as it were exchange as many words as you could on the way to the study door (1)And Othello of course calls on uh Desdemona s father doesnt he and then he tells her the story of his life
Yes so you must call on her father quite obviously and uhm (1)
Yes right
Really
I think I ve got this together eventually
Oh goody (1)
I hope this is good (.)It comes from Marks and Spencer s (.)
Bound to be (1)
Yes oh that s niceDoes she play tennis
I dont know (.)Havent gone into that yet
Uh
You ll be lucky if she doesnt (1)
Yeah I was on the way to see my grandmother (1)Cheery afternoon in the old people s home (1)
Coming back from work was sheOh no she s a student
She s a student
Oh that s good (1)Is it Martin sIs it School of Art
That s right yeah
Uhm
Oh that sounds jolly good (1)Suitable isnt itartist and writer (.) poverty stricken (1)
One tearing up canvasesthe other stamping on (1)Both weeping uncontrollably (1)
Do you think that an artist should uhm live with another artist
No
Or can an artist only live with another artist (1)
I dont know
Robin what do you think
Uh what about
candoes an artist have to live with an artist (.)
Does an artist have to live with an artist
YesWhat happens
I dont see why
Uh do they have to or can they
well uh Browning uhm and Emily you see lived together
[?...?]
Browning and uh
Uh not Emily uhm (.)Elizabeth (.)
Elizabeth
Uhm
Uhm (1)
Turner lived very happily with (.)I dont know
I think artists have sort of great (.) understanding of women[?...?] (1)
Bank managers
Right I m going to dish this up now (1)
No I think I would certainly want to live with someone that could understand one s own angst and anxieties
Uhm (1)
Some bright breezy soul would be a nightmare in (1)
Yeah maybe (.)I think I dont want to live with anybody at the moment actually (.)
You dont want to live with them
You re not a neurotic wreck on the other hand uhm
No no (1)
Anyway it s nice to have met her
Uhm (1)So how s it going with this rewrite (1)
Uh well I dont know about calling it anything like that uh (1)I m not utterly at the bottom of the road uhm (.) coconut (1)I can only see the book being about a thousand pages longthat s the trouble
So complex
Will anyone congratulate me on my cooking
Oh look at that
Wow marvellous
Uh this comes entirely from Marks and Spencer s
Doesnt it look delicious though
And all I had to do was heat it up
Here we’ve got a 4 way conversation (3 male, 1 female).
The female uses 1 tag, and the three males combined use 7.
Break this down further and we have:
- speaker A: 1
- speaker B: 6
- speaker C: 0
Are there any differences between the tag questions used in this transcript?
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