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• Din bror har søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, har han ikke?
• Din bror har ikke søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, har han?
OPERATION 1: Find the subject of the main clause (e.g. “din bror”)
OPERATION 2: Select the appropriate personal pronoun for the tag (e.g.
“han”)
OPERATION 3: Find the predicator of the main clause (e.g. “har søgt”)
OPERATION 4: Put the first verb in the predicator into the tag (e.g. “har”)
OPERATION 5: If the main clause is negative, make the tag positive; if the
main clause is positive, make the tag negative.
OPERATION 6: Reverse the order of the subject pronoun and the operator in
the tag (e.g. “han har” becomes “har han”).
We see that six of the seven operations cited for English apply – unchanged –
to Danish. So it appears that Danish-speaking children face the same
challenges in this little corner of grammar as English-speaking children do. It
is striking parallels like these that have led many linguists to adopt the view
that there exists some sort of “universal grammar”, which underlies all human
languages, and that children of every nationality are born with a highly
evolved propensity to work out major features of this system based on
language data they receive from the linguistic community they happen to be
born into. Of course, in this particular case, it must be kept in mind that
English and Danish are closely related languages – they belong to the
Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. So we may be witnessing a set
of operations which – rather than being universal – are shared by Germanic
languages.
Before leaving Danish, it should be noted that – as with English – Danish tagquestions
involve a number of grammatical features other than the operations
listed above:
• replacement of the whole tag by ikke også or vel:
o
o
Din bror har søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, ikke også?
Din bror har ikke søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, vel?
As these examples indicate, ikke også is used for the negative tag, vel for the
positive tag. These expressions are more informal than their longer
counterparts:
o Din bror har søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, har han ikke?
o Din bror har ikke søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, har han?
• Note that vel may also be appended to the positive tag:
o
Din bror har ikke søgt arbejde hos telefonselskabet, har han vel?
page 24
John M. Dienhart