Pragmatic Features of Tag Questions in Turkish

Abstract

Tag Questions are considerably multifunctional in terms of their pragmatic meanings. This study, adopting a descriptive framework, aims to identify and categorize the pragmatic functions of tag questions in Turkish, based on naturally occuring data. It is a corpus based study and draws upon a comprehensive data, driven from spontaneous speech. METU spoken corpus and 20 hours of natural conversation are used as data. Kappa is used for data analysis in order to find out inter-rater agreement for the taxonomy of Turkish tag questions. The resulting typology for Turkish tag questions is mainly similar to those suggested by Holmes’ (1995) and Tottie and Hoffmann’s (2006) typology. However, there are also different pragmatic functions of Turkish tag questions other than those proposed in the literature. Whereas mocking and justification tags are observed in Turkish, these functions have not been proposed in languages such as English and Italian.

Keywords

• tag questions
• pragmatics
• spoken language