Tag Questions, Amirite?

Some days it seems that the most common kind of understanding is misunderstanding: Every conversation—not to mention each e-mail, IM, or text message—is rife with opportunities for crossed circuits and hurt feelings. There’s no end of advice about how to avoid miscommunication: Keep things simple. Take your time. Be aware of cultural differences. But missing from all these communication-helper lists is a little linguistic tic that most people use every day: the tag question.

What are tag questions?

You know what tag questions are, don’t you? Tag questions are those little questioning upticks, usually found at the end of a sentence—like that "don’t you"?—that grease the conversational wheels. Linguists see these questions as coming in two different flavors: the kind that ask for information or confirmation ("you’ve got the tickets, right?"), called "modal" tags, and the kind that try to connect with the hearer’s feelings, softening a statement or opening the door for more conversation, called "affective" tags ("that was certainly unexpected, wasn’t it?").

Since they help keep information flowing, you’d think that tag questions would be appreciated for their importance to the language, or at least held up as a useful communications tool, but in fact, they’re almost ignored, and occasionally even mocked.

Who uses tag questions?

This may be in part because tag questions have been identified as a "female" speech pattern. The linguist Robin Lakoff, in her landmark 1975 book "Language and Woman’s Place," listed tag questions alongside qualifiers ("kind of"), weak expletives ("oh fudge!"), and empty adjectives ("fabulous," "lovely") as tools used by women to soften or weaken their statements. Based on her own impressions, Lakoff associated tag questions with "a desire for confirmation or approval which signals a lack of self-confidence in the speaker."

But as it turns out, that is only one view of the social aspect of tag questions. Studies done more recently have found that men use tag questions at least as often as women (one study found men using tag questions twice as often), and that men are more likely to use the supposedly-less-confident "ask for more information or confirmation" kind of tag questions. And the "softening" kind of tag question—the kind used to facilitate conversation—was identified less with gender than with power. It turns out that the people who are in charge of making sure conversations go well—"powerful" speakers, such as talk show hosts, doctors, and teachers—are the ones who tend...

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