This thesis examines question tags right and isn't it from pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. English question tags have most frequently been analyzed from the sociolinguistic angle while at the same time completely avoiding the pragmatic aspects that represent a key factor in the sociolinguistic background. The theoretical part of the thesis introduces sociolinguistic aspects and approaches to question tags, as well as their formal aspects. This thesis is a corpus based study (British National Corpus chosen as the primary source of material) where 200 examples were extracted from the corpus and further studied (100 examples on the question tag right and 100 examples on the question tag isn't it). The study analyzes the question tags from the sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the type of conversation (cross-gender or same-sex conversations) and relating the pragmatic functions of question tags to speakers' gender and speakers' age. Further, the analysis also inquires into what sentence types precede the two question tags. The paper also offers a revised classification of pragmatic functions of the two question tags. Key words: question tags, pragmatic functions of question tags, immediate and postponed response, speaker's gender

This study analyses the translation of pragmatic markers from English into Swedish. The source text that was translated and used as a basis for the study is an article called “Black Books”, which was published in the British music magazine Prog in January 2013. The study is limited to question tags, general extenders and single-word pragmatic markers. It aims to investigate how these types of pragmatic markers can be translated in a dynamic and natural way, as well as how a careful analysis can facilitate the search for appropriate translation equivalents. Previous research and theories were used to determine the functions of the pragmatic markers in the source text, and the translation choices made on the basis of these findings were supported by corpus searches in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus and Korp. The study revealed that because of the different ways in which pragmatic functions are expressed in English and Swedish, almost none of the pragmatic markers in the source text could be translated directly into Swedish. Formally equivalent solutions such as tja as a translation of well were generally considered too unnatural. While the study is too small to provide any general guidelines, it shows how a careful analysis may help the translator find more dynamically equivalent and natural solutions in the form of, for instance, other Swedish pragmatic markers, modal particles, adverbs and conjunctions.