Experimental evidence for the contextual acceptability of biased questions and tag questions in English

I present the results of an experiment in which 113 English speakers were asked if they would prefer to produce matrix biased questions or tag questions in neutral and negative evidential contexts. Results show speakers prefer biased questions in negative contexts and tag questions in neutral contexts. Despite the close syntactic and semantic relationship between the two constructions posited in the literature, then, the results indicate that the two are distinct. I suggest an analysis for these results building on Reese & Asher (2006) and Gunlogson (2008).