It may be a remnant from Old English in East Anglia, but it seems rather unlikely as an explanation for the American Upper Midwestern regionalism. This is a region of the US that was settled in large part by German and Scandinavian immigrants who didn’t speak English as a first language.
Looking at some dictionaries here I see that the modern German verb “borgen” (meaning both “to borrow” and “to lend”) is very similar to the Old English “borgian” (“to borrow, lend, pledge surety for”), so it all comes back to the same Proto-Germanic root anyway, but modern German would have been the much stronger and more recent influence on Wisconsin dialects.
A problem I have heard of for ESL-ers (especially Germans) is English tags.
It is a common construction to say “She is pretty, isn’t she?” The tag is the bold bit.
Notwithstanding that every native English speaker grasps them perfectly, tags follow very strange rules. They are typically constructed from supplementary verbs (“He can swim, can’t he?”) rather than the main verb (“swim”).
But sometimes the supplementary verb in the tag does not have any obvious logical connection with the verb in the main sentence - “He went to the shop, didn’t he?” Such a construction assumes a very convoluted understood structure that involves substituting “did go” for “went” in order to find any logical sense in it.
Accordingly, I have heard Indians use “isn’t it?” as a sort of universal tag - “That went well, isn’t it?” “He was lucky, isn’t it?”
Germans have a genuine universal tag - “nicht wahr?” - a consequence of which is that they can struggle with the English version.
I have an aunt-in-law who is a native English speaker who teaches English at a German university. She has had German students learning English try to say “He dances well, dancen’t he?”
The auxiliary verb. Also, the subject is always substituted with a pronoun (except with existential “there,” where no substitution is necessary). If the verb phrase has no auxiliary already, it takes a form of do.
The syntax of tags (and to a lesser degree of negative questions, as in Isn’t she pretty?) poses the greatest difficulty with production. However, comprehension–and I mean true, functional comprehension–is not so difficult with sufficient exposure to real language in context. That means listening, so that the intonation is keyed to other aspects of the larger discourse context. The syntactic aspect of tag questions and negative questions are just one dimension of the communication:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Tag questions in English
English tag questions, when they have the grammatical form of a question, are atypically complex, because they vary according to four factors: the choice of auxiliary, the negation, the intonation pattern and the emphasis. According to a specialist children’s lawyer at the NSPCC, children find it difficult to answer tag questions other than in accordance with the expectation of questioner[1].
[/quote]
The bolding is mine, to point out these last two factors are spoken and heard. When English learners can hear the tag/negative question in context (CF, “in accordance with the expectation of questioner”), they don’t have much difficulty in understanding. (Producing them in their own speech appropriately, however, is a quantum leap in challenge.) So if you test students on tags or negative questions on paper, they’re missing half of the context cues we normally call upon to process the intent.
We as native speakers can figure out the example in the post above more by a process of eliminating the less likely possibilities for that particular exchange stripped of context. With more context, however, (though still prevented from hearing the exchange), we might process the language differently:
A: The new model we just hired isn’t getting many assignments.
B: Why? Isn’t she pretty?
A: Isn’t she! She’s just difficult to work with.
(More idiomatic: She is! She’s just difficult to work with.)
In this context, only the second speaker is sure that’s she’s pretty. The first hasn’t seen her yet.
In any case, with audio to indicate the intonation and stress, such ambiguity would be more or less eliminated. For this reason I would question the usefulness of the test item. I do agree, though, with septimus and treis that it’s a very challenging but important measure of native fluency in English to test for. I just also believe that it should be tested as a listening item, because it’s so rare that one comes across isolated discourse like that in print, disconnected from all other context cues. (To test spoken competence with tags and negative questions is nearly impossible. English learners start to do that only long after they’ve left the classroom.)
BTW, the listening portion of the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language)–which is for international college students–often has items that test for exactly this. That is, the test-taker must determine whether a tag question is actually a question or is a discourse marker.
I used to have a lot of problems with “when + future state = present tense”. Eg “I’ll buy a car when I am older”. If English made sense, it would be future tense all the way, “I’ll buy a car when I will be older”.
Actually, both of those make sense; they’re just different.
In the first one, ‘when I am older’ is spoken from the viewpoint of the future, when the car is bought. In the future, I will speak in the present tense: I am older.
In the second one, the verb is from the viewpoint of now, the way other languages do it. Both verbs are in the future, the viewpoint of the main verb.
I realize that but back when I was learning English it made more sense to me to use the present as the viewpoint because, well, that’s where I was speaking from. Also, the viewpoint switching halfway through the sentence is inconsistent.
Finally, it’s the “right” way around in my mother tongue (French). But that has absolutely nothing to do with it
