Tags: Cross-linguistic diversity and commonality

The epistemic modal functions of English tag constructions, such as You’re coming, aren’t you? are well known: prototypical tags indicate reduced certainty on the part of the speaker. Tags can also have interactive effects, since they request a response from the listener. This dual function has been linked to their syntactic structure, which consists of a statement followed by an abbreviated question. But the majority of tag constructions cross-linguistically do not show this grammatical structure. This paper takes up the issue of the universality of tag functions by looking at the uses of tags in spontaneous speech in Mohawk. Tag constructions in both English and Mohawk show combinations of modal and interactive functions, but the inventories of uses of the constructions differ. Certain challenging and aggressive uses have been observed in English but not Mohawk, while certain discourse-structuring uses have been observed in Mohawk but not English. The differences can be seen to emerge from the common modal/interactive function, plus a deeper commonality, the propensity of speakers to exploit available linguistic resources for creative expression.