question tags

[bonia]

I am at a loss a little, I have come across the sentence: She can scarcely see him nowadays, can't she? As I remember, vaguely, this sentence with such words ' scarcely, rarely, hardly' should be considered as negative in meaning. So we should take  positive question tag here. The sentence should be- She can scarcely see him nowadays, can she?- Help, please!

[Scratch]

You know the rule. What's the problem?

[savageanomaly]

I am at a loss a little, I have come across the sentence: She can scarcely see him nowadays, can't she? As I remember, vaguely, this sentence with such words ' scarcely, rarely, hardly' should be considered as negative in meaning. So we should take  positive question tag here. The sentence should be- She can scarcely see him nowadays, can she?- Help, please!

These take negative question tags.

[Boyar]

The rules for canonical tag questions (your case) are very formal: a positive statement (She can ...) generally takes a negative question tag (.., can't she?)

Formally, the word scarcely does not transform positive statements into negative ones. So, there is no reason to use the positive question tag here - if your example is a real question, of course!

[Scratch]

http://www.englishgrammar.org/question-tags-advanced-points/

[bonia]

Yes, Scratch , this site confirms the rule; if we have  such words as' scarcely, rarely, seldom, hardly' we should take positive question tags! It 's great, now I am sure about it. My book written by my favourite authors Jenny Dooley and Virginia Evans 'Grammerway' gives the same answer- p179: ' They hardly ever go to the theatre, do they?'  The problem was in the test- they say that I was wrong! What a pity! I was right!!!!

[Erica Blair]

Adverbs with a negative sense in the statement clause lead to the use of an affirmative tag. Examples are...hardly, scarcely, rarely, never

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_tag_questions

Поиск дает немало примеров.

You can scarcely tell it's there, can you?
http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2008/04/jagged-icebergs-and-open-pit-brutalist.html

[bonia]

Yes, yes, yes!!!!!

[Scratch]

Who is the author of the test?

[savageanomaly]

The rules for canonical tag questions (your case) are very formal: a positive statement (She can ...) generally takes a negative question tag (.., can't she?)

Formally, the word scarcely does not transform positive statements into negative ones. So, there is no reason to use the positive question tag here - if your example is a real question, of course!

I agree. I see it as local, not global negation. Local negation requires negative question tag. Only global negation requires a positive tag.

[Boyar]

As a real life example, this phrase does not allow a straightforward interpretation. I remember a person from the UK referring to a similar phrase as being "very strange". So, putting this into a test would not be perfectly fair.

[savageanomaly]

As a real life example, this phrase does not allow a straightforward interpretation. I remember a person from the UK referring to a similar phrase as being "very strange". So, putting this into a test would not be perfectly fair.

It's not. Especially if you can't appeal.

It is a strange sentence in a sense that the meaning oscillates because of the tag. But only if you think about it. =)

[USAman]

http://www.englishgrammar.org/question-tags-advanced-points/

The author of the web page above is Jennifer Lebedeva. She is from North-West America and her husband is from Russia.
This link is about AmE (not BrE). Even GB itself has many dialects of English (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/standard.htm).
The dialects are different as for different locations as for different social groups.

If teachers told us which dialect they are talking about we would have less contradictions.
BTW, some English dialects allow double negatives in the same sentence.

Different dialects - different rules / dictionary. For example, in some English dialect the word "wee" replaces the word "little". There are more well known examples: lorry - track, lift - elevator, ground floor - 1st floor. Transitive verbs in BrE could be intransitive in AmE, etc.

You even could not use someone like Dickens as an example, because the English language is changing. It's like when you read old Russian books like "War and Peace" the people in the book use some lexicon that is not used anymore.

So, the mistakes, you found in different grammar books, could be not mistakes, but just different English dialects (BBC UK has a big project about that).

THERE IS NO STANDARD FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE - IT'S A PITY.