Listening to people reading 215discourse. This kind of oblique presentation would seem, therefore, to differ
from the minimally engaged reading we placed at Stage 1 above only in so
far as decoding and planning delays interfere with the smooth articulation
of the (uninterpreted) language sample. In practice, it most often occurs as
a switch to oblique orientation when obstacles are encountered in the course
of an otherwise directly orientated performance.
The matter is complicated, however, by the fact that the same zero tone
is exploited in a style of reading in which there are no decoding problems,
a style which we can describe as in some sense ritualized. As in spontaneous
speech, the tone unit with zero tone may occur in two different circumstances:
it can, as we have said, mark a temporary departure from an otherwise
hearer-sensitive stance in order to allow the reader to focus upon some
matter of linguistic interpretation which is currently creating a problem; or
it may be used consistently for the whole of some deliberately delineated
portion of a text or even for the whole of the text. Its effect in the latter case
is to mark the matter of the reading as not an attempted dramatization of
a situated and person-to-person communication, but as an explicitly non-
interactive presentation of whatever the content may be.
There is a difference between the two, however, for in the case of the
ritualized presentation, we can expect that some of the intonational features
it would have if it were part of a hearer-sensitive reading will be retained.
This last expectation can be illustrated if we compare two possible readings
of a stanza from Keats’s ‘Meg Merrilies’.
1 //r Her APPles //p were swart BLACKberries
//r her CURrants //p POD’S o’ BROOM
//r her WINE //p was the DEW of the wild white ROSE
//r her BOOK //p a churchyard TOMB //
2 //o her APPles //o were swart BLACKberries
//o her CURrents //o POD’S o’ BROOM
//o her WINE //o was the DEW of the wild white ROSE
//o her BOOK //o a churchyard TOMB
In the first version, the referring tone in the first tone unit of each line projects
an assumption that hearers, having been told that Meg lived upon the moors,
will naturally want to know how she managed for apples, currants and so on.
The proclaimed tone units tell them. This is to say the reading is hearer sensitive.
The lack of prominence in swart and churchyard reflects the likelihood that
these will not constitute existential selections, since edible blackberries are
normally swart and, at least in the world of Keats’s poem, tombs are normally
found in churchyards. These last details of the reading and certain others may
be open to debate, but the point is that an acceptable ritualized reading will
follow an acceptable fully engaged reading in all matters except that tone
differences are levelled under zero tone. We can make this clear by comparing
an oblique reading that an unprepared or unskilled reader might have produced: