The imperative tag—a thing apart

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In English, the imperative is sometimes followed by a tag consisting of an auxiliary verb and its subject. This is true whether the imperative itself has an explicit subject or not (Someone give me a hand here, can you?/Go home, will you?) Attempts have been made at different times to link this imperative‐plus‐tag sequence both to the regular tag question (You're going to come, aren't you?) and to requests in question form (Would you give me a hand for a moment?). On the other hand, it has also been claimed “that all imperative tags are best analyzed as synchronically frozen expressions.” Given the incompatiblity between the two perspectives just mentioned and the failure of either to resolve the problems raised by an attempt to analyze the imperative‐plus‐tag construction, the purpose of this paper will be to look once more at that construction, placing special emphasis on the tag's subjects, its auxiliaries, its intonation pattern, and its polarity, in an attempt to arrive at a more subtle understanding of the similarities and differences between it and the other two constructions just mentioned. At the same time, we will attempt to determine how syntactic and pragmatic features of the imperative stem influence the form and meaning of the tag attached to it. When we have finished, we will not be able to resolve all of the problems associated with the derivation of the imperative‐plus‐tag, but we will have found generalizations that apply to this construction that apply also to other types of utterances. In this way, we will have shown that the imperative tag is more rule‐bound and less arbitrary than has been hitherto thought. What we will find out about the imperative tag falls into three categories: (1) while the imperative tag has some rather complex characteristics that differentiate it from both the regular tag question and the request in question form, certain aspects of the imperative tag are constrained by syntactic and pragmatic features of the stem to which it is attached; (2) certain combinations of stem polarity with tag modals and intonation pattern produces a set of meanings unique to the imperative‐plus‐tag construction; and (3) an effective analysis of the form of the imperative‐plus‐tag requires us to draw on, among other things, our understanding of the function of the structure and of the context in which it occurs. Therefore, it cannot be entirely true that the imperative tag is best analyzed as a frozen expression.

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