We all know what “tag questions” are, don’t we all?
Well, if some of us don’t or have already forgotten, the mini-question “don’t we all?” in the preceding sentence is what’s called a
tag question. Some grammarians prefer to call it a “question tag,” and the whole statement inclusive of that mini-question the “tag question.”
Native English speakers purposively use tag questions to get a quick confirmation or reaction from their listeners. With this in mind, we should be able to form English tag questions ourselves with greater confidence.
Tag questions generally follow a definite pattern—a positive statement is followed by a negative tag question, and a negative statement is followed by a positive tag question. Of course, since tag questions are meant to be spoken, it’s normal to use contractions of the negative forms of verbs either in the tag question or in the main statement itself.
Let’s jog our rusty memories about the grammar of tags. From the positive standpoint: “She is,
isn’t she?” “They do,
don’t they?” “You are Filipino,
aren’t you?” And from the negative standpoint: “She doesn’t,
does she?” “They don’t,
do they?” “You aren’t Filipino,
are you?”
We can see that the tag questions above are all of opposite polarity to that of the main statement, and that without exception, the verb in a tag question always has the same tense as the verb in the main statement. (In speech, we must note here, there should always be a brief pause between the main statement and the tag question; in writing, this is indicated by a comma between the two.)
Keep in mind that there are three ways of forming tag questions depending on the kind of verb in the main statement. First, if that verb is a form of the auxiliary verb “be,” that same form must be used in the tag question: “He is from Manila,
isn’t he?” “They were of foreign origin,
weren’t they?” Second, if a main statement uses a modal such as “can,” “could,” or “should,” the same modal must be used in tag question: “She can dance,
can’t she?” “They couldn’t do that,
could they?” And third, if the main statement uses an active verb instead of an auxiliary verb, the appropriate form of the auxiliary verb “do” takes the place of that active verb in the tag question: “She loves you,
doesn’t she?” “You take me for granted,
don’t you?”
Then, when a main statement has a proper name as subject, the tag question must use its pronoun instead: “Jennifer is doing well in Singapore,
isn’t she?” “Manila isn’t the tourist capital in Asia these days,
is it?” “Some Australians eat kangaroo meat,
don’t they?”
Some forms of English-language tag questions, however, don’t strictly follow the norms that we have just discussed, like these two tags that seemingly look and sound askew: “Let’s go out,
shall we?” “Let’s not go out,
shall we?” Are they grammatically proper or not?
Yes, they are. Even if these tags often raise the hackles of grammar purists, native English speakers accept and use both of them. The strictly grammatical way to say “Let’s go out,
shall we?” is, of course, “We’ll go out,
shan’t we?”, but here are two more natural-sounding alternatives that should sit in well among Filipinos: “Let’s go out,
all right?” “Let’s go out,
okay?”
Another special case of tags involves statements that use “nothing,” “nobody,” and “no one” as subject. Such statements should be considered of negative polarity, and their tag questions should be given a positive polarity: “Nothing came in the mail,
was there?” “Nobody bothered you last night,
was there?”
Next week, we’ll round up these discussions with other special cases and even finer aspects of tag questions.
This essay, 2108th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the July 21, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2022 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay online in
The Manila Times:
Saying our tag questions right(Next week:
Notable departures from tag question rules) July 28, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
