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

extensively minimising the negative tone of the utterances. I do not claim that such
devices are improper in friendship encounters, but rather that they are less frequent
than in distant relationships.
Further, the aspect worth investigating are the circumstances in which
question tags are applied. Anna Wierzbicka (1991: 38) observed that while English
is abundant in ways to express tags, the Polish language possesses only six ways to
do so. Despite the range of question tags being less varied in Polish, the sample
reveals that the device is in fact used in wider contexts than in English. One of the
best examples of such a phenomenon is the usage of epistemic tags (for the detailed
account of which see sub-chapter 3.2.2.1.). Referring to the English sample, this
category was employed by both genders to acknowledge one’s uncertainty and
confirm one’s knowledge. However, the same form was adopted in the Polish
sample in several other circumstances, namely to express one’s unsureness, to
predict an answer to a question one has asked and to inquire about a subject
unknown to all of the speakers, the final situation being a characteristic of women
only. Thus, despite the epistemic type constitutes a similar part of all the produced
question tags in both languages (18% in English and 22% in the Polish sample), the
number of functions served by it outstandingly varies. What the above finding
implies is that the quantitative distribution of question tags is not only a genderdependent
aspect of language, but may also be considered a cross-cultural trait. A
closer insight into the functions the device serves reveals, however, that what at
first may presumably seem alike in fact is applied with a different aim by the
speakers of both genders in the two languages subjected to analysis.
On the basis of all the above, I believe that it is impossible to generalise
about such a broad topic as gender and language. Having examined only two
groups of people, I am of the opinion that in order to come to objective conclusions
about the relation between the choice of the language forms and the sex of the
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