Question tags in East African English: A corpus-based study

Abstract

Tag question constructions 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., he likes you, doesn’t he?) (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 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, Columbus, 2009, Columbus, 2010; Takahashi, 2014; Criado-Peña, 2016), while the use of the construction in the African varieties of English has been virtually neglected. Tag questions are still underexplored in East African English (EAfrE) in spite of its linguistic distinctiveness and diversity. EAfrE is composed of three varieties: Kenyan English (KenE), Tanzanian English (TznE), and Ugandan English (UgE), each of them having a different historical and socio-linguistic background, and thus making use of the language in different ways. Given the linguistic richness of EAfrE, the present study investigates the use and distribution of question tags in KenE and TznE. These varieties are studied due to the high degree of attestation and pervasiveness of the phenomenon according to eWave (Kortmann & Lunkenheimer, 2013), labeled as “pervasive or obligatory” in KenE and “neither pervasive nor extremely rare” in TznE. In the light of this, the study has been conceived with the following objectives: (a) to analyze the distribution of question tags in EAfrE and compare their use and features across the two varieties (i.e., KenE and TznE); and (b) to assess the frequency of the phenomenon across speech and writing, and across text types. For the purpose, the East African English component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) is used as source of analysis.