Prace komisji nauk.pdf - Instytut Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu ...

G: Ale teraz to pewnie jeszcze te ręczniki mokre, nie?
E: Hm, moŜliwe
[G: But now the towels are probably still wet, aren’t they?
E: Hm, maybe]
Example (5) presents a fragment of an encounter between two women, who during
the entire time that the conversation took place, remained together. Thus, the
implication that the two participants share the same background knowledge about
the surroundings seems to be justified. Yet, both of the subjects discuss a fact that
is not known to any of them. What at this point is the most surprising is that not
even one example of such question tag usage has been discovered in the speech of
men. This may indicate two possibilities. Firstly, it is probable that males do not
decide to comment on uncertain facts at all, and secondly, this may imply that men
do not unnecessarily question matters that cannot be explained by any of the
interactants. In other words, there is a likelihood that males admit to their lack of
knowledge only in cases in which they may be corrected or taught new facts by
competent participants. However, being only presumptions, these propositions
would require further investigation.
It may be thus concluded that the epistemic tags form a far more complicated
group of question tags in Polish than in English. As long as both males and females
adopt the modal tags in two situations, namely to reassure their assumptions or to
have their doubts resolved by competent interactants, women demonstrate an
additional tendency to query matters that cannot be by any means clarified
The second group of question tags that constitutes 75% of all the instances
are the ones defined by Janet Holmes (1995: 80-81) as addressee-oriented.
Affective tags, consisting of three types, are adopted to focus on the listeners’
emotions and feelings. First there are fecilititive tags, which, as the sample
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