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

E: Aha, around the shops
H: In IKEA, all of those, right?
E: I don’t like going to IKEA]
As stated above, this subtype is present in the language of both males and females,
who applied the device in a frequency of, respectively, 75% and over 50% of all the
appearing facilitative tags. Both (6) and (7) introduce speakers who are willing to
invite the remaining participants to engage in the interaction. By presenting a
positive attitude towards the listeners, the addresser engages them in the process
and, more importantly, receives the desired feedback.
The second subtype is characteric mainly of females, who applied the
following type in 16 out of 35 cases of facilitative tags. What is special about this
form is that unlike traditional tags appearing at the end of an utterance, they are
more likely to be interwoven into a statement, for example:
Example (8)
Context: A group recollecting their childhood.
H: Nie no, bo my Ŝeśmy się tak umówili, nie? z tatą, Ŝe niby mieli nam dawać
kieszonkowego tak co kilka dni – i podpisaliśmy taką umowę, Ŝe, nie? co
miesiąc kieszonkowe. (...)
[H: No, because we agreed so, right? with dad that they were going to give us
pocket money every couple of days – and we signed such a contract that, right?
every month pocket money. (...)]
The above form of facilitative tags may be described as “attention verifing”. A
constatnt application of such a device allows to control the listeners’ level of
concetration without requiring any response. Despite only in relation to same-sex
conversation, a tendency to adopt mid-utterance tags by women has been also
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