New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change

The present study analyzes clauses with final tags as a construction, i.e., a symbolic form-meaning pairing, which is formulated as [[ANCHi FTj] ↔ [S conclude verbalization of propositioni with attitudej]] (ANCH: Anchor, FT: Final Tag, S: Speaker). The final-tag construction is observed in most varieties of English. However, a comparison of two spoken corpora of English (SPICE-Ireland and the Santa Barbara Corpus) reveals that the degree of the constructional entrenchment of this symbolic unit d