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Date: | Tue, 8 Mar 2005 22:11:01 -0500 |
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The first two sound almost like a variety of right dislocation, deriving from "Why don't you empty the garbage/be reasonable," rather than arising as tags. I find when I say them that the dislocated portion is all at a low intonation level, while tags have a rising intonation.
The problem with sentences like the third and like some of the examples I used is that modals don't have symmetrical polarity. They don't work the same in the affirmative and the negative. Some of them do, but enough don't that a traditional Syntactic Structures type of tag derivation doesn't work. And it is, by the way, one of the oldest transformational rules in syntactic studies.
Herb
Chew on these:
Empty the garbage, why don't you?
Be reasonable, why don't you?
Don't tease the cat, ...?? you (will? would? certainly not "do")
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue . San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 . Fax: (805)-756-6374 . Dept. Phone. 756-2596
. E-mail: [log in to unmask] . Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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