| Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === This study mainly aimed to examine the similarity and difference between English and Chinese tag questions in literary texts or corpora that were written in the years from 1950s to 2000s, randomly selected from some online linguistic corpora—the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) at PKU and the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (Sinica Corpus). The contribution of the study to the language field indicated that language teachers could have a deeper understanding of tag questions in English and Chinese so as to help students enhance their listening and speaking ability in language communication.
The corpora in the present study consisted of 6000 English and 6000 Chinese tag questions collected from high school textbooks, literary works and online corpora. The tag question items were designed based on these corpora and were revised by two native speakers. In addition, there were 284 subjects selected for this research. They studied at senior high schools in Kaohsiung City. All the students were required to take the test. Moreover, statistical measures and quantitative analysis were employed to investigate the similarity and difference between English and Chinese tag questions and the variable of gender difference in male and female students’ performance on the tag questions test.
The major findings of this study were summarized as follows:
First, the use or occurrence of English and Chinese tag questions in different periods of time actually varied with different polarity types.
Second, the tendencies in the frequency distribution of polarity types of both English and Chinese tag questions showed that in Chinese the percentage hierarchy is P-P > N-P > P-N > N-N, while the hierarchy in English was P-N > N-P > P-P > N-N.
Third, although there were differences between English and Chinese tag questions, Universal Grammar was found to exist in the use of English and Chinese tag questions, which was manifested with the OT regulation.
Fourth, there was no significant gender difference in male and female students’ performance on the test of the three polarity types of both English and Chinese tag questions. However, taking the three polarity types into consideration, we found the hierarchy of the percentage of three polarity types of English and Chinese tag questions for male and female students: Male: ENP > EPN > EPP; CPN > CNP> CPP vs. Female: ENP > EPN > EPP; CPN > CNP> CPP.
Fifth, tag question that had the function of expressing “request” or “invitation” and that contained an embedded clause so as to form a complex sentence were difficult for students to make judgments on the choice of polarity type Moreover, the use of the word with a negative meaning in the formation of a tag question was also unfamiliar to many students.
The study concluded with a discussion of the implications for the teaching of English tag questions and offered some suggestions for further research. The researcher hopes that the research results can draw corpus linguists’ attention, provoke theoretical linguists’ interest in Optimality Theory-based research on sentence patterns, and further arouse language teachers’ awareness of teaching tag questions.
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