"Is it" appended to questions

[Lynne Murphy]

> Lynne, do you exclude everyone else when you say "Is it?" is South
> African?  (Please ignore speakers of 'izzit' or 'innit'; they're not
> what I'm looking for.)

I can't exclude everyone else, because I don't know everyone else, but 'is
it' is a stereotypical feature of SAfr E.  I haven't heard of it in Wales,
but then I'm pretty far from Wales, never been to Wales, and have a very
hard time picking out Welsh-English speakers. (The English find my
inability to distinguish Welsh accents rather amusing.  I can tell that
they're different, but always guess them as being something else.)

I found this article:
gandalf.aksis.uib.no/~gisle/pdf/READING.pdf

Which says:
"Moreover, invariant  tags have been found to occur in South Africa, Papua
New Guinea, Singapore, and in  Wales (cf Kachru 1982; Platt 1982; Todd &
Hancock 1986)."

It doesn't say which invariant tag that is, though.  (The article covers
'innit' and 'is it'.)

Also, in talking about invariant tags, I think one might want to
distinguish those that are invariant in person from uses that are only
invariant in polarity, like Wilson's example:

>> Not at all, dear fellow! My pleasure! (It's) Wilson Gray, is it?

I believe that you can use the wrong-polarity ones in many dialects, given
the right pragmatic situation--but perhaps some dialects are more prone to
taking advantage of this.  (Maybe Larry knows something about this, or
thinks I'm completely wrong!)  But not varying the person (i.e. saying
"You're Wilson Gray, is it?") is, I believe, more dialect-specific.

Lynne


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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