A good measure of spoken English is saying one’s tag questions correctly

Some people become very proficient in their written English, even to the point of winning major literary or journalistic awards for their well-crafted competition pieces. But such proficiency in writing unfortunately doesn’t always translate into a corresponding proficiency in spoken English. Not infrequently, in fact, we see and hear highly accomplished writers fumbling with their English or even totally at a loss for words when they socialize with strangers or when they need to formally address an audience of more than just a few people. Clearly, so many factors other than just excellent grammar and wide vocabulary are at work to cause such disparity in the quality of one’s written and spoken English,  but from a practical standpoint, I think one very crucial ingredient of excellent spoken English is mastery of saying the tag questions right.

In the two-part essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004, I show how the purposive use of grammatically correct tag questions can make people better and more effective conversationalists, able to confidently and gracefully connect with other people and seamlessly elicit desired responses from them. Internalizing the various kinds of tag questions will take some doing, of course, but by memorizing the rules for making them and by assiduously practicing their use, it shouldn’t take very long for one to become a much better if not a sparkling English speaker. (October 24, 2011) 

Saying our tag questions right

Part 1:

A good indicator of one’s English proficiency is the ability to use tag questions properly. But wait—we all know what “tag questions” are, don’t we all? Well, if some of us don’t or have already forgotten, the mini-question “don’t we all?” in the preceding sentence is what’s called a “tag question.” Some grammarians prefer to call it a “question tag,” and the whole statement inclusive of that mini-question the “tag question.”

For our purposes, however, we will refer to the mini-question as the tag question itself, or “tag” for short; we will not quibble over the terminology. The important thing is for us to fully appreciate and understand how native English speakers purposively use tag questions to get a quick confirmation or reaction from their listeners. With that, we should be able to form English tag questions ourselves with greater confidence, using them flawlessly to emphasize our thoughts and ideas and to elicit the desired response from our listeners.

Most of us will probably recall that tag questions generally follow a definite pattern: a positive statement is followed by a negative tag question, and a negative statement is followed by a positive tag question. Since tags are meant to be spoken, of course, it’s normal to use contractions of the negative forms of verbs either in the tag question or in the main statement itself.

Here’s a quick drill to jog our rusty memories about the grammar of tags. From the positive standpoint: “She is, isn’t she?” “They do, don’t they?” “We can, can’t we?” “You are Filipino, aren’t you?” And from the negative standpoint: “She doesn’t, does she?” “They don’t, do they?” “We can’t, can we?” “You aren’t Filipino, are you?”

We can see that the tag questions above are all of opposite polarity to that of the main statement. Also, we must keep in mind that without exception, the verb in a tag question always has the same tense as the verb in the main statement. (In speech, we must note here, there should always be a brief pause between the main statement and the tag question; in writing, this brief pause must always be indicated by a comma between the main statement and the tag question.)

Some of us will probably also recall that there are actually three ways of forming tag questions depending on the kind of verb used in the main statement.

First, if that verb is a form of the auxiliary verb “be,” the same form of that verb must be used in the tag question: “He is from Manila, isn’t he?” “We aren’t that bad, are we?” “They were of foreign origin, weren’t they?”

Second, if a main statement uses a modal such as “can,” “could,” or “should,” the same modal must be used in tag question: “She can dance, can’t she?” “They couldn’t do that, could they?” “We shouldn’t interfere in their affairs, should we?”

And third, if the main statement uses an active verb (instead of only an auxiliary verb), the appropriate form of the auxiliary verb “do” takes the place of that active verb in the tag question: “She loves you, doesn’t she?” “You take me for granted, don’t you?” “They played the part, didn’t they?” 

We will recall, too, that when a main statement has a proper name as subject, the tag question must use its pronoun instead: “Jennifer is doing well in Singapore, isn’t she?” “Manila isn’t the tourist capital in Asia these days, is it?” “Some Australians eat kangaroo meat, don’t they?” “Nestle is the biggest food company in the world, isn’t it?”

We must be aware, however, that some special cases of English-language tag questions don’t strictly follow the norms that we have just discussed. Here are two such tags that seemingly look and sound askew: “Let’s go out, shall we?” “Let’s not go out, shall we?”

Are those tags proper or not? Yes, they are. Even if those tags often raise the hackles of grammar purists, native English speakers accept and use both of them. The strictly grammatical to say “Let’s go out, shall we?” is, of course, “We’ll go out, shan’t we?”, but it sounds stiff and unnatural. Here are two natural-sounding alternatives that should sit in well among Filipinos: “Let’s go out, all right?” “Let’s go out, okay?”

Another notable special case involving tags is the whole range of statements that use “nothing,” “nobody,” and “no one” as their subject. In such cases, the statements should be considered of negative polarity, and their tag questions should be given a positive polarity: “Nothing came in the mail, was there?” “Nobody bothered you last night, was there?” “No one wants this, is there?”

We will take up other special cases and other fine aspects of tag questions in the next essay. (May 24, 2004)

Part 2:

We will continue our discussion of some notable departures from the usual positive-negative and negative-positive rule for forming tags, or those mini-questions purposively added by speakers at the end of their statements to get a quick confirmation or denial from their listeners. That general rule, we recalled, is that a positive statement should be followed by a negative tag, and a negative statement should be followed by a positive tag: “She’s winning, isn’t she?” “They’re not conceding, are they?” “We’ll not get into trouble for this, would we?”

Now, here are a few more tags that don’t scrupulously follow that polarity rule: “I’m correct, aren’t I?” (Not “I’m correct, amn’t I?” The awkward tag “amn’t I” is “am I not?” in contracted form, which is unacceptable grammar). “She’d better take it, hadn’t she?” (Not “She’d better take it, wouldn’t she?” The tag “hadn’t she?” is actually “had she better not?” in contracted form. That tag is the logical polar negative of the full statement “She had better take it,” where the operative verb form is “had better,” not “take.”). “This will do, won’t it?” (Not “This will do, willen’t it?”—which uses a tag that doesn’t exist in English. Conversely, the reverse-polarity statement will be “This won’t do, will it?”) 

Another exception about tags that bewilders many nonnative English speakers is this: the opposite polarity rule can actually be pointedly ignored when people want to strongly express sarcasm, disbelief, surprise, concern, shock, or anger. Take the following examples: “You think you’re indispensable, do you?” “Oh, you will really do that, will you?” “Oh, she really left him, did she?” “So you’re finally getting married, are you? That’s great!” (Or the contrary sentiment: “So she’s finally getting married, is she? The nerve!”) “And you think that’s amusing, do you?”

And then, as a mark of politeness, positive tags can also be routinely attached to positive requests: “Come here, will you?” “Do that, will you?” “Please hand me that screw driver, will you?”

When people use negative statements with negative tag questions, on the other hand, it is not necessarily bad grammar but a sure sign of the breakdown of civility or of downright hostility and combativeness: “So you don’t love me at all, don’t you?” “You really didn’t like the idea, didn’t you?” “So you don’t think my school is good enough, don’t you?” “So you didn’t want peace after all, didn’t you?” The negative tags emphasize the negativeness of the main statement to deliberately rile people or to make them feel guilty. They give vent to feelings of meanness.

Now, from experience, we all know that using negative statements with positive tag questions in the standard manner is the polite, socially acceptable way of asking for information or help. Such statements are particularly useful if we don’t know the people being addressed.

It is rude, for instance, to simply approach or accost on the mall someone we don’t know and ask, pointblank, “Where’s the women’s room?” The civilized way, of course, is to restate that question to the needed degree of politeness, depending on who is being addressed.

Here’s that same question said a little bit more politely, addressed to people of about the same age or social station as the speaker: “Do you know where the women’s room is?” (A tag question is not used in such cases.)

Now here it is in a polite, nonaggressive form, this time addressed to people older or of a higher social station than us: “You wouldn’t know where the women’s room is, would you?” (This time, the question form “Do you know...?” and the tag question that follows make the statement sufficiently deferential.)

Here are a few more patterns of negative statements with positive tag questions, the use of which should make us more pleasant, convivial people to deal with: “You don’t know of any job openings in your company at this time, do you?” “You don’t happen to know where the stock exchange building is, do you?” “You wouldn’t be willing to lose all that money in gambling, would you?” “You haven’t got anything to do with what happened, do you?” “You can’t spare me a thousand for my son’s tuition, can you?” “You can’t believe it that the woman’s leading the race, can you?”

The beauty of negative statements with positive tag questions is that they subtly prime up the listener’s mind either to accept the given idea or to decline it quickly and gracefully; in fact, refusing to answer the positive tag questions at all actually will make the person being addressed look rude and impolite. In this classic communication gambit of appealing to the other’s goodness of heart and of cushioning a possible blow to one’s self-esteem before that blow is even inflicted, nobody should lose face whatever the answer might be. (May 31, 2004)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 24 and 31, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Some multifunction English words that we learn to use only by gut feel

There are some multifunction words in English that we learn to use simply by gut feel. Hardly anyone of us bothers to check out precisely how these multifunction words work. Cases in point are the function words “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.”  We just think we know when they are functioning properly in our sentences and when they are not, and we often get away scot-free even when we misuse them because very often, most of our listeners or readers don’t know any better. Perhaps the only time we’ll find out that we have done badly with them is when our English teacher gives back our essay or term paper to us with not a few harsh grammar corrections, or when we submit something for publication, in which case a professional editor does a really brutal and unapologetic copyediting job on our work. Only then do we feel the need to really brush up on our English grammar to spare ourselves from the humiliation of again being shown to be less than savvy in our English.

In “A few English-language conundrums,” a series of essays that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005, I discussed several perplexing aspects of English grammar for which many people have only conjectural ideas, among them the proper usage of “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.” I now would like to share that essay with Forum members by posting it here under the title “Four very common grammar puzzlers in English.” (July 31, 2011)    

  

Four very common grammar puzzlers in English

Let’s take up four very common grammar puzzlers:  “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.” 

Even after using the word for many years, some of us may not have figured out yet that “either” actually functions in four ways:

(1) As a pronoun to mean “the one or the other” (“We decided to use either of the two computers.”);

(2) As an adjective to mean “being the one and the other of two” (“There were spikes on either side of the fence.”) or “being the one or the other of two” (“Arlene uses either hand to write.”);

(3) As an adverb to mean “likewise” or “moreover” when used to emphasize a negative statement (“He was not smart or handsome either.”); and

(4) As a conjunction in “either…or” constructions, a form that gives rise to some grammar conundrums that we will try to unravel in a little while.

When “either” functions as a pronoun or adjective, of course, the standard practice is to use it in the singular sense to refer to only one of two items, as in “Either of the two choices is unpalatable to me.” But when more than two items are involved, “either” becomes a semantic misfit, so we use the word “any” instead, as in “Any of these five runners is likely to win” (that’s “any” working as a pronoun) and “A red marking on any face of the cube will suffice” (that’s “any” working as an adjective). Some liberal teachers or editors might let us get away with using “either” in such sentences, but it is prudent to stick to “any” for our own semantic peace of mind.

The word “any,” though, simply won’t work as a conjunction in a form similar to “either…or.” This time, English gives us no choice but to break its rule of two and use “either…or” even if it refers to more than two items. Such is the case in the following “either…or” construction with three coordinate clauses: “Either you go ahead with your candidacy or we will field another candidate or we might as well forget about fielding one altogether.” With “either” right in front, the sentence can theoretically string more and more clauses with “or” and remain grammatically correct. Except for this minor semantic quirk, the behavior of “either” as a pronoun, adjective, and adverb is fairly straightforward and needs no further discussion.

In the case of “either…or” as a conjunction, however, we run smack against two sticky grammar conundrums: what form the verb and pronoun should take when the “either…or” construction mixes singular and plural elements, and how to execute the parallelism rule for grammar elements in “either... or” constructions.

Doing “either…or” constructions is simple when both of the elements referred to are singular or when both are plural. In the first case, the verb invariably takes the singular form, as in “Either my mother or my brother is coming tomorrow.” In the second case, the verb invariably takes the plural form, as in “Either my parents or my brothers are coming tomorrow.” But when we have a sentence that mixes singular and plural elements, should the verb be singular or plural?

In such mixed situations, an accepted practice is to make the verb agree with the number of the noun or noun phrase closest to it: “Either my mother or my brothers are coming tomorrow.” “Either my brothers or my mother is coming tomorrow.” But some grammarians feel that such mixed “either…or” constructions are inconsistent no matter what number the verb takes, so they suggest rewriting the sentence to get rid of the inconsistency. One way is to drop “either” and recast the sentence a little bit: “My mother or my brothers might come tomorrow.” “My brothers or my mother might come tomorrow.” The sense of both sentences is intact even with “either” gone, proof that the word is not functionally necessary in such mixed constructions.

All that remains is for us to make sense of the parallelism rule for “either…or” constructions. The basic principle in parallelism, of course, is matching in both form and structure all equally important ideas or grammatical elements in a sentence. One useful rule of thumb for achieving this in “either…or” constructions is to place the word “either” right before the first of the two elements being compared.

For instance, the following sentence is incorrect (and illogical) because it puts “either” where it shouldn’t be: “They either planned to buy a townhouse or lease an apartment.” Now see what happens when we put “either” right before “buy a townhouse,” which is the first of the elements being compared: “They planned to either buy a townhouse or lease an apartment.”

Now we have a logical statement that not only looks right but also sounds right. (April 11, 2005)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 11, 2005 © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.