Kim, Hyesook. 2014. Corpus-based Study on Gender Differences in the Functions of English Tag Questions. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study examines gender differences, focusing on the functions of English tag questions using three social variables: age, education, and private/public situations. This research is a corpus-based study which used 753 tag questions extracted from the British component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). This paper is the sequel to Kim Hye-Sook(2010), which examined gender differences in the frequency of tag usage. In this present study attention was turned to functions of tag questions to examine whether the gender differences in the tag usage were related to different tag functions. The four functions considered in the study were informational, facilitating, softening and challenging(cf., Holmes 1995; Tottie & Hoffmann 2006). The 753 tags were categorized into those four functions by a native speaker of British English. The tags used by the British men and women in the ICE-GB corpus had no significant gender differences in the functions of tag questions. The tags were used consistently in the order of informational, facilitating, challenging, and softening by both men and women regardless of age, education and private/public situations.

• 김혜숙(건양대학교) | Kim, Hyesook