Bob,

    I think tags are generally yes/no requests appended to a sentence. In
this case, I think it's not a question about which chicken was eaten,
but whether the "chicken I ate" (identified) was cooked well.
   It could be thought of as a run-on sentence, though that would be more
relevant to writing.
   I'm not sure I would recommend it, but the discussion started around
whether taq questions are a fixed grammar or are somewhat flexible in
the way we use them. I see them as fundamentally interactive, asking
for a targeted response from a listener. In this sense, they do act
like ordinary questions, so a case could be made that this one is comma
spliced to another clause. At any rate, we do have other examples of
tag questions targeting a subordinate clause. Relatives (especially
restrictive relatives) may be an extreme stretch, and I may be pushing
this too far.

Craig >

I think this example is a yes-no question on which chicken was eaten.
>
> "The chicken I ate was chicken you cooked
> well, didn't you?"
>
> and not really a tag.  As I noted in a previous post, Biber et al. cite
> such examples.
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
> at:
>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/