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Chapter 4 - Tag Questions and Gender in Indian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

By
Claudia Lange  and
Sven Leuckert
Edited by
Tobias Bernaisch
Tobias Bernaisch
Affiliation:
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
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Summary

This paper is concerned with one of the features typically associated with genderlectal differentiation in language, namely tag questions. It investigates the repertoire of tag questions in Indian English, comprising both canonical and non-canonical tags such as invariant isn’t it and the indigenous forms no/na. Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are chosen. Firstly, we apply a multifactorial analysis to the data derived from the private dialogues in the International Corpus of English for India (ICE-India) in order to determine the interplay of (sociolinguistic) context factors for the occurrence of specific tag question types. Secondly, we consider patterns of social interaction and their linguistic correlates in all-female, all-male, and mixed-group conversations, thus trying to establish locally meaningful uses of tags. We also offer some general considerations on the feasibility of integrating more recent sociolinguistic approaches towards the category of gender in corpus-linguistic research.

Keywords

Indian EnglishAmerican EnglishBritish Englishtag questionsassociation measureshomosocialityWorld Englishesgendercorpus linguisticsmultifactorial statistics
Type
Chapter
Information
Gender in World Englishes , pp. 69 - 93
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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