CONSTRUCTIONS WITH A CONNECTED QUESTION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION TEXT: VARIETY

Merkuryeva Natalia Yuryevna

The article deals with the variety of tag-questions from old texts. The linguistic material is selected from the plays and novels written by O. Wild, B. Show, K.J. Jerome, A. Conan Doyle, W.S. Maugham, L. Carroll and some others during the period of 1880-1900. Three groups of tag-questions are distinguished. Lexical content of the tags, the forms of words and word order in them, the using of punctuation marks between the anchor and the tag, the arrangement of the tags within the anchors are under analysis.

Keywords:historical syntax of the English language, tag-question, tag-questions typology, language change