230 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
//o when ENGland PLAYED //o their WORLD //r+ CUP MATCH //p
aGAINST the PRESent //r+ CUP HOLDers //p RURiTAnia //In this extract it seems reasonable to say that the tone choices are motivated
in different ways. Some of it resembles minimally engaged reading: when
England played their world; some of it resembles engaged reading about
language in which the reader is making sure that what he has taken down
is correct: cup match...cup holders; in yet other tone units, he seems
simply to be telling what he has written, presumably on the assumption
that the journalist will tell him if he’s got it wrong: against the present
...Ruritania. The rest of the extract comprises predominantly ‘making
sure’ tone units, interspersed with minimally engaged tone units having
level tones.
//o ENGland //r+ had HELD the CHAMpions //r+ to ONE ONE //r+ until
HALF TIME //r+ but SOON after play was reSUMED //r+ a PENalty /
/p was awarded aGAINST them //r+ the decision //o caused UProar //r+
among a group of ENGland FANS //r+ and THIS in TURN //o TRIggered
//o an ANgry resPONSE //o from SOME //r+ opPOSing supPORTers //
o IN //o an adJOINing SECtion //p of the STAND //Tone-unit-by-tone-unit speculation about what is going on in readings like
these is clearly a risky business. We cannot pretend to know what the readers’
intentions are from moment to moment; nor, indeed, must we be trapped
into assuming that they necessarily know what they are themselves. We can
merely try to give a generalizable explanation for their behaviour, and I
have tried to do so by appealing to an analysis of some of the things which,
on the intonational evidence, they might be thought to be doing. Although
they give us reason for supposing that different modes of reading can be
separated out and related to different uses of the intonation system, the
second and third readings, in particular, show that we must be prepared for
considerable variation in mode—for different kinds and degrees of engagement—
in the same reading.
PROJECTING A CONTEXT
The notion of differing degrees of engagement is nowhere more necessary
than when we seek to explore what happens when people read verse aloud.
In this final part of the chapter I shall turn to this particular form of
reading. There would seem to be good reason for doing so, for it is hard
to see how a study of that feature which, above all others, is commonly
taken to distinguish verse from other kinds of writing, metre, can be carried
on without some recognition that it has potentiality for being realized as
speech. And the foregoing suggests that readers, in the process of realizing
metre, will be operating at one or more of the stages of engagement we
have identified.