29.4332, FYI: CFP Deadline Extension - Exoticism in English Tag Questions

Mon Nov 5 20:35:15 UTC 2018

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4332. Mon Nov 05 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4332, FYI: CFP Deadline Extension - Exoticism in English Tag Questions

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Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2018 15:35:04
From: Matthew Scott [matthew.scott at cambridgescholars.com]
Subject: CFP Deadline Extension - Exoticism in English Tag Questions

Dr Blasius Achiri-Taboh of the Department of Linguistics at the University of
Buea, Cameroon, invites contributions to an edited collection entitled
Exoticism in English tag questions: Strengthening arguments and caressing the
social wheel , which will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Please see below for the full description and for details of how to submit.
Please also note the extended deadline for abstract submissions, which is now
the 5th of December

Within the last sixty years, tag questions have attracted quite a lot of
attention among scholars from a variety of perspectives, especially those
concerned with the syntactics-semantic and socio-pragmatic aspects of the
English language. At the beginning, studies on tag questions dealt primarily
with the syntactic and semantic aspects of the latter. These include works by
O’Connor (1955), Bolinger (1957), Palmer (1965), Arbini (1969), Palmer and
Blandford (1969), Huddleston (1970), Langendoen (1970), Armagost (1972),
Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1972), Cattell (1973), Quirk and
Greenbaum (1973), Hudson (1975), Oleksy (1977), Bublitz (1979), Knowles
(1980), Hintikka (1982), Culicover (1992), Kolln and Funk (1998), Huddleston
and Pullum (2002), Downing and Locke (2006), Cailor (2009, 2011), Batllori and
Herman (2012), Kandybowicz (2013), Holmberg (2012), Breitbath, De Clercq and
Haegeman (2013), Tabua (2014), Achiri-Taboh (2015a, 2016), and Pena (2016).
These works have largely been concerned with the study of tag questions within
descriptive and transformational generative grammars from the perspective of
rules of formation and response for the purposes of either seeking information
or having information confirmed. 

However, other studies soon emerged of tag questions from the point of view of
sociolinguistic variations, as question tags have since started behaving more
and more as discourse pragmatic markers. Works in this direction include those
of Lakoff (1972; 1975), Dubois and Crouch (1975), Crosby and Nyquist (1977),
Lapadat and Seesahai (1977), McMillan et al. (1977), Dines (1980), O’Barr and
Atkins (1980), Cheshire (1981; 1982), Faerch and Kasper (1982), Holmes (1984;
1995), Schiffrin (1987), Algeo (1988), Cameron et al. (1989), Coates (1989),
Winefield et al. (1989), Stenstrom (1994), Traugott (1995; 2012), Fraser
(1996), Andersen (2001), Cheng and Warren (2001), Tottie and Hoffman (2006),
Pichler (2010; 2013), Kimps, Davidse and Cornillie (2014), and Achiri-Taboh
(2015b). Most of these have been concerned with the differences between men
and women in the use of tag questions, and with the use of tag questions as
discourse pragmatic markers on a par with particles like eh?, right?, and
okay?, or to serve a variety of pragmatic functions, which include
attitudinal, epistemic, and politeness functions. 

In different varieties of English around the world, the need for the use of
tag questions has, over time and for a variety of reasons, drawn from
different local linguistic experiences and realities, either as a result of
deliberate code-switching or sheer language contacts and evolution, to the
extent that, today, these varieties potentially exhibit different
corresponding varieties of tag question with different shades of
morpho-syntactic forms, and semantic and socio-pragmatic functions. An example
is the use of nàa in Cameroonian colloquial English as an invariant tag
question both for seeking confirmation of positive or negative assertions and
for performing different pragmatic functions (see Achiri-Taboh, 2015b).
Another example is the Canadian particle eh (Avis 1957, Woods 1980) shown in
Wiltschko and Heim (submitted) as a ‘confirmational’ with similar functions as
an ordinary tag question. Cameroonian nàa is different from Canadian eh as a
tag question in that, unlike the latter, the former is not preceded by a
pause. Studies that explore the evolution of English tag questions and the use
of tag questions in English from the perspective of different speech
communities around the world form the scope of the book. 

Aim of the book: 

The aim of the book is to put together a collection of interesting original
synchronic/diachronic studies – between 10 and 12 chapters (or a little more
as the need may arise) – that explore the evolution of English tag questions
and their usage from the outlandish standpoint, answering the big question:
how are tag questions used in different English speech communities around the
world (and why)? Potential authors, who are scholars that are interested in
the use of tag questions in English, are therefore invited to contribute
chapters that examine the nature of borrowed particles and
borrowed/non-borrowed words and phrases that are used in different forms and
in different varieties of English as tag questions, either for
confirmatory/information-rendering or peculiar discourse-pragmatic purposes,
and how ordinary English tag questions have been used in the past and now in
current English. Each chapter of between 4000 to 10000 words (or more if need
arises) will undergo both an editorial and one blind peer review or two.
Issues to be addressed include (but are not limited to) the morpho-syntax
and/or socio-pragmatics of the following: 

Issues of agreement in tag questions: A historico-comparative perspective 
Polarity in tag questions: English and other languages 
Canonical tag questions and speech act variations 
Canonical vs. invariant tag questions in English: nuances 
Issues of intonation in English tag questions 
Syntactic positioning of tag questions: Canonical vs. invariant tags 
Tag questions on non-declarative anchors 
Invariant tag questions in English: A cross-dialectal study 
Dialectal and idiolectal differences in English tag questions 
Purposive use of tag questions: A typological perspective 
Borrowing and canonical/invariant tag questions 
Tag questions and politeness strategies across varieties of English 
Children’s use of tag questions 
Tag question acquisition/learning and performance 
Procedure 

Please, submit a detail abstract of 400-1000 words in two files, a word file
and a pdf file to achiri.blasius at ubuea.cm by 5 December, 2018, with at least 5
references to support your chapter proposal. The abstract should attempt to
show how the chapter intends to contribute to the exposition and/or
understanding of exotic ways by which the use of tag questions has evolved in
different varieties of English today. Be original and innovative,
reader-friendly, interesting but scholarly in both input and style. 

New Deadline for abstract submission: 5 December 2018

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

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