Tags and Negative Polarity Items

Abstract

Tags are elements or (remnant) clauses that attach to a sentence in order to signal various speech acts, e.g. the common question tags of the type is it? isn’t it?. An affirmative tag, which is used in order for the speaker to confirm the content of the matrix clause is presented in (1). (1) Pappa kan hämta dig vid stationen, kan han nog (#1435) (Swedish) dad can fetch you with station.DEF can he probably ‘Daddy can pick you up at the station, he probably can’ The Negative Polarity Item (hence NPI) nå 'anything' in (2) has developed from the neuter indefinite pronoun/determiner något 'something/anything'. (2) Moster Lisa har nog inte kommit än nå (#1436) (Swedish) aunt Lisa has probably not come yet NPI ‘Aunt Lisa probably hasn’t arrived yet’ The distribution of the affirmative sentence tag and the NPI nå in Scandinavia has not been subject to many studies, but it is present to a great extent in the Scandinavian languages. In the following, we will make an attempt to give a survey of the use of tags and NPI's in the varieties of Swedish. We disregard the other Scandinavian languages.