Question tags and epistemic stance taking in spoken German: The case ​of final oder 'or'

German typically encodes interrogativity in two syntactic formats: Yes/No-questions with the finite verb in first position (such as: Hast du sie angerufen? ‘Have you called her?’) or requests for information with a question word in first and the finite verb in second position (Warum hast du sie angerufen?‘Why have you called her?’). Particularly in spoken interaction, speakers use question tags appended to verb-second statements (Du hast sie angerufen, oder? ‘You have called her, haven’t you/or?’) to contextualize requests for confirmation. However, the systematic use of questions tags in spoken German is largely understudied.

In my talk, I will first give a general overview of the most frequent questions tags in mundane spoken German. Based on a corpus of informal and institutional face-to-face-interactions, I will then focus on two prosodic variants of the tag oder (‘or’) with level or rising intonation. While both tags index a rather high epistemic gradient between the interlocutors, they vary in the kind of epistemic hedging they perform: Constructions with level oderindicate that the speaker does not have epistemic rights to the matters in question. Using constructions with rising final oder, however, speakers show that they have some unconfirmed prior knowledge which is in conflict with assumptions in the prior speaker’s turn. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the findings’ implications for future studies in interactional linguistics.