About the Use of Tag Questions in Andean Spanish

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the use of tag questions in the variety of Andean Spanish spoken in Bolivia. In particular, it explores the tag questions that occur in the Corpus oral del español hablado por bilingües de aymara-español. The analysis consists of two levels. On the one hand, it describes the pragmatic functions of tag questions and identifies the correlation between their distribution and their pragmatic functions. On the other hand, it focuses on the impact that social factors, such as speakers’ sex, age and education, have on the frequency of tags. Along these lines, it displays the lack of a general sociolinguistic trend in the use of tag questions and, furthermore, shows that the higher frequency of tags in a sociolinguistic group rather than in another is tag-dependent.