tag question
in linguistics, a short interrogative clause attached to the end of a statement to invite the agreement of a listener, as in The bird flew away, didn’t it? or We’ve not been here before, have we? In English, the form of the tag question is determined by the structure of the main statement and a combination of linguistic rules involving pronominalization, negation, interrogation, and truncation, as seen in the examples given above. The ability of young children to form appropriate tag questions is considered a prime illustration of their early mastery of linguistic rules.