Re: What is this construction

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 10:02 +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Staving Shreyas Sampat:
> >Peter Bleackley wrote:
> >
> >>He liked languages, did Tolkien.
> >>
> >>It may be a particularly Northern English form. Does anyone know what
> >>such a construction is called?
> >
> >I've never seen this form, except as "did <pronoun>?" as a tag question.
> >Do you have some specific example that you were thinking of? Your
> >(apparently) made-up one doesn't look grammatical, to me.
>
>  From this and various other responses, it's clear that this particular
> form is dialectal and peculiar to northern England, as I had previously
> surmised. The question tagging thing that Shreyas mentions is something
> totally different.
I'd like to point that I'm quite familiar with this sort of usage,
though I'm unlikely to produce it. It sounds quaint and old-fashioned
and english, all of which are synonyms. (I'm Australian, fwiw.)

--
Tristan.

Reply