ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the frequency and formal features of declarative tag questions, including instances with innit, as well as their distribution across gender, age and social class in the Spoken BNC2014. This study complements the evidence in Axelsson (2011), which is based on the spoken demographic component of the BNC2014. Despite the limitations in the comparability of the two datasets, the study reveals important patterns of use of declarative tag questions in current British English, indicating the effect of age as a social variable: speakers over 40 tend to use more declarative tag questions than those under 40. The study also touches upon methodological issues of using spoken datasets created under different conditions and corpus tools comparability.
