216 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
3 //o her APples were //o SWART //o BLACKberries
//o her CURRants POD’S //o o’ BROOM //, etc.
While the phonological shape of (3) can be presumed to arise largely from
decoding or other problems that the reader happens to have along the way,
that of (2) results from a partial meshing of the reading with a projected
interactive context. While (3) is thus an involuntary consequence of something
that has nothing to do with speaker/hearer relationships, (2) can reasonably
be regarded as a result of a filtering out, on the part of the reader, of those
distinctions that speakers customarily realize by choices in the proclaiming/
referring system.
The kind of reading that makes use of level tones in this latter way can,
therefore, be thought of as taking us one step away from the minimally
engaged end of the continuum: it is hearer-sensitive in the way that it
assigns prominence and tone unit boundaries, but, perhaps intentionally, not
so in its choice of tones. The kind of ritualistic performance that results is
fairly easily recognized in, for instance, much of the reading that forms part
of religious observance. It is also frequently heard in the reading aloud of
poetry, a fact that we shall return to later. It is worth noting in passing that
these are both likely to be, to a large extent, rehearsed readings, based upon
prior consideration of the implications of the subject matter: that is to say
prior consideration of what the communicative value of the material might
be if it were spoken instead in a conversational context.
In practice, it is not always possible to distinguish readings of the two
kinds we have compared. If the phonological shape of a particular reading
of, say, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ comes about accidentally, as it
were, as a result of the chance encounter with decoding problems, there is
a considerable likelihood that it will coincide with a perfectly acceptable
ritualized version, deeply pondered and carefully executed. Often, there is
not much room for variation and, for reasons that we need not go into here,
places where decoding difficulties occur may well be those places at which,
in probable discourse contexts, tone unit boundaries would be indicated. In
analysing a particular reading, therefore, we may often have no way of
knowing whether what we have is just the consequence of disfluency or of
discoursically significant choices. The distinction is, nevertheless, one that
must be recognized if we are to get a clearer picture of how degrees of
engagement are manifested in performance. We will say that ritualized oblique
reading represents Stage 2 on our scale.
ENGAGEMENT: 3
Stage 3 on the continuum can be represented by a kind of encounter with
the written word that may seem, at first sight, to merit no consideration at
all in the working out of an interactive theory of communication: the reading
aloud of an uncontextualized sentence.