The evolution of negative tag questions in the language of British novelists: A corpus-based diachronic analysis

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the diachronic evolution of negative tag questions through a corpus-based approach. The four research questions at the basis of this study have been formulated after preliminary observations on negative tag questions only. The first hypothesis to be verified is weather tag questions underwent a shift towards informality, as it appears that nowadays, negative informal tag questions, with the negation in the synthetic form, are preferred to the formal and analytic version. The second main objective is to clarify whether negative tag questions’ word order changed in time, as it was observed that they can display the negation in three distinct ways. Lastly, this dissertation aspires to gain an insight on the hypotheses according to which, this language construct has been increasingly used in time, and to understand if, being tag questions typical of speech, they appear only in direct speech of literary works. To verify the correctness of these four hypotheses, a corpus-based approach has been used, being it a scientific and widespread method employed in linguistic analyses. Possible answers are provided thanks to a quantitative analysis on the presence of negative tag questions in a corpus consisting of literary works written by seven British chosen novelists, mainly from the 19th century. This will be possible thanks to CLiC Corpus, an online corpus created as a result of the collaboration between the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham.