218 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
different division of knowledge in which mystery will be proclaimed as
matter not yet shared.
It is important to be clear that this is not a case of the intonation contrast
merely duplicating the information represented by the the/a contrast. If it
were, alternative permutations would be heard as anomalous. It is rather
that the form of the sentence exerts sufficient pressure in the direction of
assuming one or other of two possible sets of discourse conditions to incline
readers towards differential readings.
Experiments with a range of other pairs of sentences, differentiated in
other ways, and eliciting readings which varied with respect to other intonational
variables, suggested that, at least under the test conditions appertaining, this
tendency of the reader to construct some kind of rudimentary discourse
context even for a single sentence is very general. Moreover, when sentences
do not elicit anything approaching a consensus reading, it seems that this
is because their form would allow them to be equally plausible contributions
in a number of different contexts.
I shall take it, then, that the phonological forms in question represent a
clear movement along the scale of engagement. They exhibit, in fact, the
only kind of engagement that is available for readers performing this particular
task: engagement with a hypothetical conversational nexus constructed ad
hoc on the evidence that the sentences provides. As occupants of Stage 3 on
the scale, they differ from Stage 2 cases in that, in addition to other features,
the tones associated with an engaged reading are deployed.
Although, therefore, the reading out of sentences has little place in what
we might regard as normal linguistic activity, and the kind of performance
it elicits occurs only to a negligible extent when people read other material
for non-experimental purposes, there are reasons why the kind of Stage 3
engagement they involve is worth bringing into focus. For one thing, it
shows the very marked propensity readers have for placing what they read
in an interactive context, even when the help they have in constructing that
context is no more than vestigial. We might almost say that attaching some
kind of interactive significance to linguistic items is the more natural way
of dealing with them. Another reason is that it serves to underline the need
for some differentiation among possible degrees of engagement like that I
am attempting.
I can illustrate this by looking briefly at a matter that has attracted a lot
of attention in the literature of Linguistics in recent years. Linguistic
methodologies which take the sentence as their starting-point tend to rely
heavily upon what is taken to be an already agreed ‘citation form’. There
would seem to be an obvious connection between the kind of reading activity
I have just described and the act of ‘citation’ on which so much of linguistic
argumentation depends. If we read aloud—or even articulate inwardly to
ourselves—the examples that linguists ‘cite’ we usually have no alternative
but to treat them as isolated sentences; indeed, it is often stated that it is in
this capacity that we must view them. Unfortunately, though, there is little