Listening to people reading 225certainly be said to be a ‘better’ reading if it is judged solely on the basis
of its meshing with a likely listeners’ world.
It would, however, result in a sequence of three referring tones; the
consideration we have mentioned above of not taking too much for granted
could plausibly result in the reader proclaiming more than was strictly necessary.
Much the same applies later to;
//r the deCISion //p caused UProar //r+ aMONGST a GROUP //p of
ENGland FANS //A reasonable prediction would be that it would be England fans, rather than
those supporting Ruritania, who would be upset by a questionable decision
against England. There is therefore no obvious reason why the last tone unit
should be proclaimed. But, once more, we notice that if every tone unit that
could justifiably have a referring tone had one, there would be a lengthy
series of them. So again, we find that departure from the ‘expected’ pattern
is in the direction of taking less for granted.
It would be difficult to say why one tone unit in the sequence rather than
another has a proclaiming tone rather than the expected referring tone; the
choice could well be a random one. What we should expect, however, and
what seems to be borne out in practice, is that substitutions are much less
likely to be made in the other direction. The version
//r supPORters CLASHED //r when ENGland //p played their WORLD
CUP match //which substitutes referring tone for proclaiming tone in the first tone unit,
amounts to a misreading of the item: it attributes to hearers the assumption
that there was a clash of supporters somewhere, and assumes that their
interest is in hearing where! However bad the reputation of football fans
may have been at the time, the news item would scarcely have been addressed
primarily to that interest.
If the tendency towards extra explicitness can be related to tone choice,
it seems to be even more in evidence in the allocation of prominent syllables.
In the kind of community of interest that the football world represents, the
four tone units (and six prominent syllables) of
// when ENGland // played their WORLD CUP match // against the
PRESent cupholders // RURiTAnia //would, in reality, amount to an unnecessary indication of several of the
selections. Probably, all that would be really necessary would be to remind
hearers of the two teams. This would be achieved by a version which had
just two prominent syllables:
// when ENGland played their world cup match against the present cup
holders ruriTAnia //which, for most people would amount to