Self-representation in english spoken discourse: corpus-based pragmatic-and-sociolinguistic approach

The paper is devoted to a corpus-based pragmatic-social-and-linguistic analysis of the tag clause that is considered to be a form of discursive self-representation. Reflecting such social conventions of Britishness as distance regulation and communicative tonality of the tag clause is used in coordination with social status and a speaker’s role in interactions. The research is based on oral speech samples from the British National Corpus. Social, demographic, regional, age and some other metadata of the corpus were supported by Lancaster Stats Tools online, which helped to integrate statistics on the frequency of tag clause usage, to characterize its syntactic variations and discourse value in English oral talks. Three syntactic models that differ in their predicative base may be used in English to construct the tag clause (affirmative, interrogative, imperative), and their choice reflects the varieties of pragmatic intentions, that may be: fact or detail verification, small talk, strong or weak position representation, consent, agreement or objection, disagreement, disbelief, disregard, or politeness. Corpus analysis of social indexes of speakers points to low level of gender preferences in the tag clause usage, proves correlation between various intentions of self-representation and the choice of tag clause models by social classes and age groups on a synchrony level, highlights negative dynamics in the frequency of tag clause in speech of modern young British.