"Is it" appended to questions

[Paul Johnston]

Singapore English has invariant ""is it", used in all the contexts
discussed on this thread.  I think I've heard it from Welsh-English
speakers ("is it" again), but I'm not sure of the contextual
constraints/

Paul Johnston
On May 14, 2007, at 9:39 AM, Lynne Murphy wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Lynne Murphy <m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK>
> Subject:      Re: "Is it" appended to questions
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
>> 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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