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.

This large- scale corpus study examined the gender differences in the use of tag questions in terrns of three different social variables: age, education and private/public situations. Seven hundred and fifty- three tag questions were extracted from the British component of the 1ntemational Corpus of English (ICE -GB), where social variables were parsed and tagged. Overall, women used a slightly higher number of tag Questions: Out of the weighted 5E() tag Questions, men used 'l37 tag Questions (43.1%) and women used 313 tag questions (56.9%). Among men, the number of tag questions increased with age while the number of tag questions decreased with age among women. The women in the 18-25 and 26-45 age brackets used more tag Questions than the men in the same age brackets. But the women older than 45 used fewer tag Questions than the men older than 45. Women with a secondary education used more tag Questions than men with the same education. But both women and men with a tertiary education had about the same frequency of use of tag Questions. 1n the private situations women used more tag Questions than men while in the public situations men used more tag Questions than women