A Corpus-based Study on Question Tags in ELF. An Attempt to Determine an Emergent Construction

Abstract

Recent research on English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) has indicated that ELF can be analyzed in accordance with the main principles of the Construction Grammar approach (Pirc 2013). Admittedly, while the majority of studies have been devoted to its creative and unpredictable character, little attention has been paid to how ELF can be conceptualized if its emergent elements are treated as constructions. Thus, the present paper conducts a corpus- based study on the Question Tag Construction (henceforth the QTxC) in ELF with a view to indicating in what way the QTxC can be determined. With the support of the VOICE and BNC corpora, the performed analysis has shown that the analyzed realizations of the QTxC in ELF, while having formal properties that deviate from the norms of English, can also be characterized as exhibiting various sub-types of the prototypical function of the QTxC.