Anacolutonic appendage

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 18, 2004, at 5:03 AM, Grant Barrett wrote:

> When I was a boy, I had a cousin who used to say things like, "I have a
> lot of cars, do I?" How's that for anacoluthic, innit?

it's been known for a long time (at least since Bolinger's
Interrogative Structures of American English, though of course ESL
teachers have been aware of the phenomena ever since there were such
things as ESL teachers) that there are several types of tags in
english; they differ in syntax, prosody, semantics, and pragmatics.

very briefly, there are tags with polarity reversal -- of two types,
with different prosodies and very different meanings/uses (try the
famous "You don't love me any more, do you?" with rising vs. falling
intonations on the tag).  and there are positive tags on positive main
clauses, which can be used to challenge someone's assertion ("So you
think I'm an idiot, do you?") or to accost someone by stating the
obvious ("Got a problem with that tire, do you?"); this is the type of
grant barrett's cousin's question, although we'd need to know what the
speaker intended by the question.  (note that the main clause can be
either full or reduced.)  there are imperative tags ("Give me a wrench,
will you?").  and there are fixed tags, like "right?", "hunh?",
"innit?", and a pile of others.  most languages use only fixed tags,
but english does this complex thing in which tags repeat various
features of the main clause.

tags of all sorts are syntactically integrated with their main clauses,
so that (in line with orin hargraves's comment) the term "anacoluthon"
seems particularly inappropriate.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), pretty sure that he's never used the
adjective "anacoluthic", though that seems to be the way to say it