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/