“Ah lovely stuff, eh?” 1 – On invariant tag meanings and usage across three varieties of English.

1. “Ah lovely stuff, eh?”1 – On invariant tag meanings and usage across three varieties of English. Georgie Columbus University of Alberta 1 HEU 618, BNCWeb.

2. “Ah lovely stuff, eh?” ‘eh’ is an invariant tag (InvT)

3. “Ah lovely stuff, eh?” Invariant tags are tag questions that do not change form e.g. He hates math, eh? They hate math, eh? c.f. canonical question tags He hates math, doesn’t he? They don’t hate math, do they?

4. Definitions • An InvT is a tag which is not a canonical question tag – no polarity, no agreement • E.g. Huh? Eh?Yeah? Hey? • I can get them photocopied and send them out to people if that would be easiest eh • And you approve of that,huh?

5. Definitions • Sometimes InvTs have been called response elicitors (e.g. Biber et al., 1999) • aim to elicit a response from the listener – either verbal or gestural (Biber et al., 1999; Holmes 1983) • controversial in that responses not necessarily found in corpus studies (e.g. Berland, 1997) • Hence using ‘invariant tag’ label

6. Invariant tags then: • Can elicit a response from the hearer or promote feedback or interaction in conversation • Offer speaker’sattitudebeyond the propositional level • i.e. of the hearer, the topic, themselves • Focus for this study is the meaning of four select InvTs: yeah, eh, no and na

7. Tags • Canonical question tags well investigated • Interesting syntactic/semantic issues e.g. polarity, agreement • Common grammar topic in ESL texts • InvTs studied in individual varieties • Sociolinguistic and sociocultural relevance • E.g. tracking of teenage use in the COLT corpus vs. adult use • Not usually taught in ESL

8. Invariant tags • No cross-varietal studies have been done yet • Differing methodologies of previous studies make their results incomparable

9. Research questions • To describe InvTs in New Zealand English (NZE), British English (BrE) & Indian English (IndE) in detail: • position within utterances, • functions/meanings of a subset, • & relative frequencies of all InvTs within and across each variety • Today we only look at the meanings of a subset

10. Methods • International Corpus of English (ICE) for NZE, BrE and IndE • Search in Wordsmith 4 • All private spoken conversation files imported as text files of 200,000 words per corpus • Manual semantic and quantitative analysis • Context used as much as possible for the functions • Prioranalyses of tags as background information rather than as a starting point for classification • No intonation markup or audio files so relied on context

11. Occurrences: BrE, NZE, IE

12. Occurrences: BrE, NZE, IE

13. Shared InvTs: BrE, IE, NZE

14. Meaning results for four tags

15. Meaning results for four tags

16. Meaning results for four tags

17. Meaning categories Confirmation check • Used to check the listener shares the speaker’s belief • Consistent across varieties – the only meaning used in all four tags and all three varieties • Closest in meaning to a traditional ‘checking question’ question tag • Though checking verification also in canonical question tags and in other InvT functions

18. Meaning categories Confirmation check • E.g. (ICE-GB S1A-002#94-99) A: So you you’re both interested in performing <,> within this integrated <,> dance group yeah C: Uhm uhm. Uhm uhm A: That appeals to you both <,> B: Uhm C: Yes

19. Meaning categories Emphatic • Emphasises the speaker’s propositional meaning • Can appear either at the end of the utterance or within the utterance • Found in na, yeah, eh, and in IndE no

20. Meaning categories Emphatic • E.g. (ICE-NZ S1A-030#37-41) K: That’s exactly what Kev said. And I said look um I think it’s..I sort of looked at it like that and I thought you know yeah why do they? They don’t need to know as much about Maori because they’re not like us. We’re teachers, it’s a bit different.

21. Meaning categories Narrative • Acknowledges listener but does not seem to elicit response • ‘story-telling’ (Gold, 2005), ‘narrative’ (Gibson, 1977, after Avis, 1972) • The opposite of minimal responses? • ‘Non-turn-yielding tag’ (Andersen, 2001, p135) • No in IndE, eh – though only 1 each in BrE and IndE – {NZE} and {BrE, IndE}

22. Meaning categories Narrative • E.g. (ICE-NZ S1A-080#299-304) N: Oh I’ve got all these books, heaps of them eh. (Laughs) All round here and (unclear word) R: Mm. N: So I make them available to my moko when he comes yeah and he just...And then... <,,> R: Yeah

23. Meaning categories Post opinion/statement • Appeals to listener to confirm/approve the speaker’s fact or opinion • Speaker-centred rather than hearer-centred • Putting forward an idea and then making it less committal by hedging/inviting comment with a tag • Not the same as Confirmation Checking, where speaker’s belief of the hearer’s knowledge is different • Eh in NZE and BrE, no in IndE only, yeah in all, though lower NZE use – preference here for eh

24. Meaning categories Post opinion/statement • P is not asking if his assumption is correct, but rather making a claim and leaving the conversational space for the interlocutor to comment. • E.g. (ICE-NZ S1A-072#398-401) B: I’m an acquaintance of Phil Roberts P: Oh yeah P: He’s pretty intelligent eh B: Yeah

25. Meaning results for four tags

26. yeah use • The most preferred InvT in BrE – 74 • Narrative function in BrE and IndE (42% and 36%) • Also Post opinion/statement and Emphatic • But NZE different usage: Narrative and Prod/Encouragement and Really?/Check questions – extension of original BrE function • {NZE} vs. {BrE & IndE}

27. eh use • Very low use in BrE (16 raw occs) and IndE (8), yet is NZE’s most frequent marker (560) – 85% of all NZE InvTs • 16 functions in NZE • Only 6 and 7 functions in IndE and BrE

28. Functions of eh

29. no use • Preferred InvT in IndE (388) – 63% of the total for the 4 tags here • Not in BrE corpus; marginal in NZE • Potentially result of sampling method? • Or from preference for yeah/you know and/or canonical question tags in BrE and eh in NZE?

30. na use • Interesting tag – multiple origins: Hindi, Urdu na as pre-verbnegative imperative, short form of nahi negator particle, Anglicised form of Punjabi naah, some parts of India use ah • Almosta synonym for no except in its use for Affirmation/Confirmation • IndE use of na almost half its use of no • Negation is na’s semantic origin in several languages, but it can mean Affirmation • e.g. No it may be implemented na say for admissions

31. Positional distribution

32. Implications • These tags are small and have subtle meaning differences – could this be problematic for ‘global English’? • Different varieties have different preferred InvTs as well as meanings for them • Would these differences cause miscommunication, as intervarietal intonation differences can (Gumperz, 1982)? • The role of invariant tags in conversation should perhaps be brought into ESL/ESP syllabi?

33. Further questions • This study was necessarily small – would a study of all the English InvT meanings/ functions continue the trend of differing frequencies and meanings available? • What level of difficulty do variance in meanings create for L2 speakers?

34. Further questions • How do Canadian and Australian English compare (once ICE-CAN and ICE-AUS are available), particularly with respect to hey and eh? • Do other global languages (e.g. Spanish, Chinese) have similar ranges in tokens, types and meanings of their InvTs?

35. Thanks, eh!

36. Selected references Andersen, Gisle. 1998. Are tag questions questions? Evidence from spoken data. Paper presented at the 19th ICAME Conference, Belfast, United Kingdom. Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Avis, Walter. 1972. So eh? Is Canadian, eh?. Canadian Journal of Linguistics,17, 89-105. Berland, Unni. 1997. “Invariant tags: pragmatic functions of innit, okay, right and yeah in London teenage conversations.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Bergen, Norway. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Gibson, Deborah. 1977. Eight types of ‘eh’. Sociolinguistics Newsletter 8 (1), 30-31. Gold, Elaine. 2005. Canadian Eh?: A survey of contemporary use. Proceedings of the 2004 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Winnipeg:University of Manitoba. Holmes, Janet. 1982. The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal, 3, 40-65.

37. Selected references (cont.) Love, Tracey. 1973. “An examination of eh as question particle.” Honours thesis, University of Alberta. Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1992. ‘We’ve all got to go one day, eh?’: powerlessness and solidarity in the functions of a New Zealand tag. In Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz and Birch Moonwomon, eds. Locating power: Proceedings of the Second Annual Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley, California: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Norrick, Neal R. 1995. Hunh-tags and evidentiality in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics,23, 687-692. Starks, Donna, Laura Thompson and Jane Christie. 2006, May. Whose discourse particles? New Zealand eh in the Niuean migrant community. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, York University, Toronto, Canada. Stubbe, Maria and Janet Holmes. 1995. You know, eh and other exasperating ‘expressions’: an analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication,15, 63-88.

38. Previous InvT studies • Andersen (2001, inter alia), Berland (1997) innit, okay, right, yeah in COLT • speaker variation - mostly sociolinguistic factors • Gibson (1977), Gold (2005): Canadian eh? • meaning through examples and acceptability judgments • Meyerhoff (1992), (1994), Stubbe and Holmes (1995), Stubbe (1999), NZ eh? • speaker variation - mostly sociolinguistic factors • later studies corpus-based (WSC), first two interview-based • Norrick (1995) hunh? • corpus-based meaning approach