Tag question

A tag question is a construction in which an interrogative element is added to a declarative or an imperative clause. The resulting speech act comprises an assertion paired with a request for confirmation. For instance, the English tag question "You're John, aren't you?" consists of the declarative clause "You're John" and the interrogative tag "aren't you?"

In most languages, tag questions are more common in spoken usage than in formal written usage. They can be an indicator of politeness, hedging, consensus seeking, emphasis and irony. They may suggest confidence or lack of confidence; they may be confrontational, defensive or tentative. Although they have the grammatical form of a question, they may be rhetorical (not expecting an answer). In other cases, when they do expect a response, they may differ from straightforward questions in that they cue the listener as to what response is desired. In legal settings, tag questions can often be found in a leading question. According to a specialist children's lawyer at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), children find it difficult to answer tag questions other than in accordance with the expectation of the questioner using or tagging a question.

Question tags are formed in several ways, and many languages give a choice of formation. In some languages the most common is a single word or fixed phrase, whereas in others it is formed by a regular grammatical construction.

In many languages, the question tag is a simple positive or negative. Russian allows да? (yes) whereas Spanish and Italian use ¿no? and no? respectively. In Indonesian, sometimes ya? (yes) is used but it is more common to say kan?, which probably is a contraction of bukan (negation for nouns).

Another common formation is comparable to the English correct? or the informal form right?, though more often realised as the word for true or truth, in fact, such as in Polish prawda? or "co nie?", Slovak pravda? or the particle však?, or Spanish ¿verdad?, which in turn can be presented in a negative form (not true?), such as in the Russian не правда ли?, German nicht wahr? Lithuanian ar ne?, or Latin nonne?

A plain conjunction may be used, such as the Czech and Slovak že? (that). Various other words occur in specific languages, such as German oder? (or), Slovak či? (or, colloquialism), and the Mandarin Chinese 吗 ma (a question denominator, used as a modal particle to denote questions – untranslatable).

Another pattern is to combine affirmation and negation, as can be done in Chinese, for example as 對不對 duì bù duì (Correct or not?); or Vietnamese đúng không? (Correct, no?).

Some languages have words whose only function is as a question tag. In Scots and certain dialects of English, eh? functions this way. French has hein?, Southern German dialects have gell? (derived from a verb meaning to be valid) and Brazilian Portuguese has né? (actually a colloquial contraction of não é, literally isn't it, while é?, pronounced much like English eh?, would have a different intended meaning, that of English right?), Hungarian uses "ugye?".