192 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
and to segment it in this way is that he hopes to provide a model which
he considers to be more fluent and, therefore, more representative of the
target language.
In (24), a rather different reason for repetition and re-segmentation seems
to occur:
24 S: //o GREEdy TOM //o had EATen //p a DUCK //
T: //p GOOD //
//o GREEdy TOM HAS //p EATen a DUCK // (a)
The teacher, although indicating the response as acceptable with //p GOOD
// wishes to focus attention on the student’s error ‘had”. On the subject of
segmentation Brazil (1982a:287) proposes that
one reason for ending a (tone) unit and beginning a new one is the need
to select afresh in one of the three systems (tone, key and termination).
If a motive exists for doing this, then boundaries may occur anywhere.The teacher’s motives in this case for creating a tone unit boundary between
‘has’ and ‘eaten’ appear to be twofold. Firstly, he wishes to make ‘has’
prominent. By this means he presents it as being selective in the ‘existential
paradigm’ (Brazil 1985:41). In other words, ‘has’ is selected as opposed to
‘had’. Secondly, he wishes to select high key for ‘eaten’ (see below). The
result is that what one might predict to be the intonational characteristics of
(24a) in a different discourse setting (that is, ‘has’ and ‘eaten’ in the same
tone unit with ‘has’ being made non-prominent or non-selective), are modified
in response to certain pedagogical considerations.
Use of high key as a way of drawing particular attention to a word is a
common feature in feedback in the corpus. One example was in (24) above.
Another is in:
25 S: //o siti HAwa //o is GOing to WATCH //p TElevision //
T: //p GOOD //
//o siti HAwa //o is GOing to WATCH //p TELevision //
where high key is selected for ‘going’. Attention is focused on ‘going’ here,
not because of some error in the student’s response, but because this is the
part of the pattern the teacher wants the students to pay attention to. The
general communicative significance of high key, according to Brazil (1985:67–
74) is to mark the matter of the tone unit as in some way ‘contrastive’. In
examples (24) and (25) the teacher invokes the ‘particularizing’ function of
high key where the implication is that ‘going’ is selected rather than all
other alternatives that the students might consider acceptable. In other words,
‘going’ is heard to be carefully selected and, therefore, worthy of particular
attention. Similarly, in:
26 S: //o YUsof CAME //p from a VERy imPORTant FAMily //
T: //p YES //