ConSOLE 29 2021 • Leiden University

You shall know a tag by the context it occurs in: An analysis of German tag questions and their responses in spontaneous conversations

Yulia Clausen

University of Potsdam

yulia.clausen@uni-potsdam.de
German syntaxCommon ground management devicesDiscourse functions

Abstract

This study explores the contexts of occurrence of German sentence-final question tags 'ja', 'ne', 'nicht', 'gell' and 'oder' in a corpus of spontaneous conversations. In German, these tags can be used interchangeably for the most part, yet there do exist cases where certain tags are less felicitous or even unacceptable. I propose an analysis of these tags as common ground management devices and demonstrate the relevance of their contexts and responses they occur with for determining their felicity conditions and discourse functions.

Access & Citation

Citation Formats

APA Style

Yulia Clausen (2021). you shall know a tag by the context it occurs in: an analysis of german tag questions and their responses in spontaneous conversations. In Proceedings of ConSOLE 29, edited by Annie Holtz, Iva Kovač, Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, Joanna Wall, (pp. 116-140).

BibTeX

@inproceedings{holtz-tddeletion-2021, title={You shall know a tag by the context it occurs in: An analysis of German tag questions and their responses in spontaneous conversations}, author={Yulia Clausen}, booktitle={Proceedings of ConSOLE 29}, year={2021}, pages={116-140}, editor={Annie Holtz and Iva Kovač and Rasmus Puggaard-Rode and Joanna Wall} }

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