Exploring Stance-Taking through Tag Questions in British University Seminars: A Typological Analysis
- 1 School of Foreign Languages, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, China
- 2 School of Foreign Languages, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China
Abstract
This paper investigates the role of tag questions in expressing stance within British university seminars. Building on Kimps’s (2018) classification of stance-conveying tag questions, this study uses the British seminars from the BASE Corpus to explore how university instructors and students use tag questions to communicate their attitudes, opinions, and perspectives during seminar discussions. The findings reveal that stance expression through tag questions spans a continuum, from alignment to neutral to disalignment, with various nuanced stance types emerging in specific seminar interactions. This research aims to provide insight into how tag questions function as a tool for stance expression in the interactive discourse characteristic of higher education seminars.
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