Nordic Journal of Linguistics

Table of Contents - 1982 - Volume 5, Issue 02  

Research Article

Tag Questions and Grammatical Acceptability

Jaakko Hintikkaa1

a1 Department of Philosophy, FSU, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.

Abstract

Recent grammars rule out uninverted tag questions (unnegated tag questions when the main clause is also unnegated and vice versa) as ungrammatical. It is argued that the inversion is merely a conversational phenomenon which is not always required. Linguists requiring inversion have been misled by their “intuitions”, which cast general doubts on their role in recent linguistic theorizing.