The language professionals will be with you shortly (soon), but I can tell you one thing for sure:
“The band is playing, is it?”
“Your family is going away, is it?”
“Everyone is having fun, is it?”
Those are all “wrong.” You accidentally forgot that a tag question usually (there are exceptions that we won’t discuss here) is negative if the first part is affirmative:
I think that the “correct” sentences would be:
“The band is playing, isn’t it? / aren’t they?”
“Your family is going away, aren’t they?”
“Everyone is having fun, aren’t they?”
P.S. In theory, “every + one” is singular, so I think that “Everyone is having fun, isn’t he?/ isn’t she?” is possible. But native speakers do not usually speak this way. I guess that you could say that if you were speaking to a group of all males/ females.
Right, there are exceptions. Affirmative tag question with affirmative statement (for example “The band is playing, is it?”, or, as I would probably normally say, “The band are playing, are they?”) can be used in colloquial speech, typically when the speaker is questioning something he/she has heard. This form is quite common in my part of the world in the right conversational context.
Hi Babacool.esque,
I think we need to keep in mind that tag questions are first and foremost a feature of spoken English. They are used in everyday conversation, and thus tend to be quite informal most of the time. As such, we can say what might be more typical than something else, but the reality is that there is variation in the tag questions that end up being used.
That said, this is my [color=blue]two cents:
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[size=75]“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” ~ George Bernard Shaw[/size]
Thanks!