226 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
// when ENGland played ruriTAnia //The shared knowledge that the England v. Ruritania game was existentially
equivalent to World Cup match and that the present cupholders was similarly
equivalent to Ruritania eliminates the possibility of selection at three of the
syllables that the reader has made prominent: WORLD, CUP, and PRESent.
Only slightly less transparent considerations would allow a reduction of
(and this in turn) // provoked an ANgry response // from some opPOSing
supporters // in an adJOINing section // of the STAND //to
// provoked an angry response from some opposing supporters in an
adjoining section of the STAND //In the context of a news item about a clash the response would hardly be
other than angry, those making it would hardly be other than opposing
supporters, and if they had not been in an adjoining section of the stand the
consequences would probably not have been newsworthy.
There is no need to labour the point that—regardless of post hoc assessments
of what might or might not have been made non-prominent— the ‘higher
than necessary’ incidence of prominent syllables is helpful to the hearer
rather than otherwise in the peculiar case of the news bulletin. It is a form
of redundancy that is regularly found in this kind of reading, and, like other
forms, it doubtless facilitates the decoding process. As with tone choice, the
possibilities of substitution are unidirectional: selective significance can be
ascribed redundantly to an item which, on a dispassionate view of the matter,
is probably not selective, but, if an item really is selective in its given
context, alteration will result in something that is either unintelligible in the
context or makes the wrong point. Thus, at the opening of the bulletin
// in the NATional stadium at niblitz today //would give the misleading impression that the ensuing item was about the
‘national’, as opposed to the other stadiums in that city. Omission of either
of the prominences in
// supPORters CLASHED //would miss the essential information that the item is about supporters (as
distinct from players) and the fact that they clashed (as distinct from the
other things they may have done).
A summary of the reader’s behaviour with respect to tone choice and
prominence assignment might, then, be represented like this: