would you ? (obligation) Join us for lunch tomorrow, will you ? (invitation) Don’t ever meddle with my papers, will you ? (warning) The pronoun ‘they’ is used if the subject of the sentence refers to people or animals or things in plural.
e.g. The young should learn to take up responsibilities, shouldn’t they? The toys in the box are not new, are they ? Though the subjects ‘someone, somebody, anyone, anybody, no one, nobody, everything, everyone and everybody’ are singular in meaning, the pronoun ‘they’ is used in the question tag.
e.g. Nobody has arrived yet, have they ? Everyone will attend the party, won’t they ? The pronoun ‘it’ is used in the question tag when the subject of the statement is: • a thing or an animal in singular form • ‘Something’, ‘Anything’ or ‘Nothing’ • ‘This’ or ‘That’ e.g.
The peacock is the national bird of India, isn’t it ? The blue frock was more expensive than the pink one, wasn’t it ? Something has gone wrong in the circuit, hasn’t it ? This is not your dad’s car, is it ?
When the statements begin with ‘There’, the same is used as the subject of the question tags too. e.g. There is not much time left, is there ? There was a pond beside the temple, wasn’t there ?
The words ‘hardly, scarcely, rarely, barely and seldom’ are considered as negatives and therefore take positive question tags. e.g. We rarely visit our native town, do we ? Ajith seldom speaks in English, does he ?
Statements having ‘a little’ or ‘a few’ are positive and therefore they take a negative tag. Statements having ‘little’ or ‘few’ are negative and therefore take a positive tag. e.g. A few germs can be viewed through this microscope, can’t they ?
Little do your parents know about this problem, do they ? The appropriate form of ‘be’ is used, if the statement contains a ‘be’ verb. The ‘be’ forms ‘is, are, was, were’ are repeated in the tag.