English Noun Phrase Tags and Other Related Phenomena

In Spoken English, anaphoric pronouns do appear first with their co-referential noun phrases attached at the end of the clause, not infrequently. The co-referential pronouns are preceded by full noun phrases, too. Called reinforcement tags or tails in the grammar books of Spoken English, these sentence-final noun phrases in the former exhibit various syntactic and semantic characteristics. The latter is called heads, or prefaces in the literature. These noun phrase tag constructions do share many properties with backward pronominalization, question tags, declarative tags, and appositive noun phrases. However, they are clearly distinguished from these related constructions in their syntax and semantics. In this article, we present a comparative analysis of them based on the spoken English data.