The analysis of tag questions in a computerised corpus of child bilingual language.

The focus of this presentation is the use of tag questions (such as “is it?”, “don’t you?” etc.) by two Brazilian/English bilingual siblings in their interactions with both monolingual and bilingual interlocutors. The study reports on just one aspect of my research project of which the primary aim is to investigate code-switching (CS) in a computerized corpus of child bilingual language. The corpus contains over 150 recordings (approximately 30 hours) of naturalistic interactions between the two main informants, a girl ‘M’ and her brother ‘J’ (aged 5 and 3 years at the beginning of data collection in 2001), and their monolingual and bilingual family relatives. Typical interactions include family meal times, child play, playing board games, reading books, telephone conversations and discussions about language. Longitudinal in nature, the data were collected over four years, primarily in Brazil where the siblings were born and where they lived until moving to England in 2004. Transcribed according to the CHAT system (MacWhinney, 2010), additional codes were designed and inserted throughout the corpus to allow for the automatic analysis of various linguistic phenomena such as insertional CS, mixed forms, meta-linguistic comments, errors and tag questions, the particular focus of this presentation. In addition to reporting on what the results indicate about the use of tag questions by the bilingual informants, I aim to demonstrate the methodological advantages of a corpus linguistic approach to language analysis.