Negative Transportation and Tag Questions

The syntactic evidence provided by Robin Lakoff for the existence of a negative transportation rule is examined, and is found to be insufficient to establish the rule. It is shown that performatives are not the only verbs requiring tag questions to be formed on the next S down, and that this is of crucial importance in arriving at an adequate account of tag questions. Attention is drawn to certain semantic regularities which seem to account for the pattern of occurrence of tag questions without recourse to a rule of negative transportation. In the final section, an attempt is made to widen the field of discussion in the negative transportation debate by raising a new problem.