QUTAG Question tags
Definition
Tag questions appended to statements: “isn’t it?”, “do they?”, “won’t you?”
Detection Rules
mfte
MFTE tag question patterns (lines 607-620). Two groups: canonical (aux/modal + optional negation + pronoun + ?) and reversed (pronoun + aux/modal + optional negation + ?). Specific word lists rather than POS classes to match MFTE’s precision. MFTE uses negative WH-word checks at j-4/j-5 to prevent tagging in WH-question sentences (e.g., “What could I do?” should not tag “I do ?” as QUTAG). Since CQL cannot express positional lookbehind, “do” is removed from the reversed PRP+aux+? pattern to avoid this false positive; canonical patterns still catch “do you?” etc.
cql[word="can|could|will|would|shall|should|may|might|must|did|had|do"] [word="not|n't"] [pos="PRP"] [word="?"]
cql[word="can|could|will|would|shall|should|may|might|must|did|had|do"] [pos="PRP"] [word="?"]
cql[word="is|does|was|has|do"] [word="not|n't"] [word="it|she|he|they"] [word="?"]
cql[word="is|does|was|has"] [word="it|she|he"] [word="?"]
cql[word="do|were|are|have"] [word="not|n't"] [word="you|we|they"] [word="?"]
cql[word="do|were|are|have"] [word="you|we|they"] [word="?"]
cql[pos="PRP"] [word="can|could|will|would|shall|should|may|might|must|did|had"] [word="?"]
cql[word="it|she|he|they"] [word="is|does|was|has|do"] [word="not|n't"] [word="?"]
cql[word="it|she|he"] [word="is|does|was|has"] [word="?"]
cql[word="you|we|they"] [word="do|were|are|have"] [word="not|n't"] [word="?"]
cql[word="you|we|they"] [word="do|were|are|have"] [word="?"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5 | p6 | p7 | p8 | p9 | p10 | p11
Approximate: auxiliary/modal + pronoun + question mark.
cql[pos="MD|VBP|VBZ|VBD"] [pos="PRP"] [word="?"]
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Sources
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
Notes
Relevant to conversational/speech registers.