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

[E: And you stop it, because the girl has to eat, because she’s growing
C: And the whole plate of pierogi goes into the breast, yes?]
Example (10)
Context: A male and a female discussing their preferences.
C: [...] musiałem kolację zjeść, a nie lubię przy ksiąŜkach jeść, i tak włączyłem,
bo jeszcze bym upuścił czy coś
H: Ale to jest dobre, bo tak to byś całe Ŝycie nad ksiąŜkami spędził, a tak musisz
na jedzenie przerwać, nie?
[C: […] I had to eat my supper and I don’t like to eat by the books, and so I just
turned it on, because I could have dropped or something
H: But it’s good, because otherwise you would spend your whole life with
books, and that way you have to stop for food, right?]
In both of the above examples, it is noticeable that the speakers confront the
addressees in a humorous way, not intending to offend or contradict the other side’s
opinion. The courageously expressed remarks could be accepted only in a group of
closely related people who would not take them personally. Such relations have
been established within the research group; hence, challenging tags appear in the
sample rather often. What is interesting is the fact that these tags appear the most
frequently in exchanges between male and female friends and are rarely observable
in same-sex interaction.
The remaining form of question tags, i.e., the softening form, is very rare and
is applied in the sample only by female interactants. Their role is to attenuate the
strength of the utterances, for instance Daj mi trochę wody, dobra? [Give me some
water, all right?]. Being concerned about the addressee’s emotions, the speaker
uses a tag to reduce the power of the direct request and at the same time asks for
the interactant’s acceptance. The fact that the softening tags are used so
infrequently may be cause by several factors. One of the explanations may be
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