ENGLISH TAG QUESTIONS IN UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

The objective of this paper is to explain the existence of tag questions in English as a consequence of the principles of Universal Grammar together with the peculiar syntactic properties of English, in the spirit of the Principles and Parameters approach. The tag question must meet all requirements on Tags in general. Crucially, a Tag must contain a pro-IP that is bound by the Sentence. The tag question satisfies this requirement, in that the pronominal subject, the copied Aux and empty VP taken together constitute an instance of pro-IP bound by the Sentence. An important conclusion to be drawn from this binding requirement is that Tags involve long-distance binding of an empty category, not movement. It is shown that the general principles licensing Tags, taken together with the possibility of empty VP in English, yield the form of the English tag question.