234 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
could have been speaking to. The content word scarlet may seem to be a
different matter, however. The reason for not making it prominent is as
follows. The dismissive explanation is essentially the equivalent of
//r+ ONly SOLdiers //To say this is to say that scarlet is not selective. If it were part of the
speaker’s purpose to identify the soldiers by referring to the colour of their
uniforms, to specify scarlet soldiers rather than, let us say, blue ones, we
should expect prominence. If he did, indeed, do this, an understanding
might be projected that scarlet soldiers, in particular, were no cause for
anxiety, a projection which would be contradicted by what happens later.
My reading reflects the more likely circumstance that scarlet is a taken-for-
granted characterization of soldiers (at a time, perhaps, when all soldiers wore
red), and it is worth noting that the additional connotations that this emotive
word take on in a retrospective revaluation of the line— bloodstained, perhaps,
or bloodthirsty—are possible only if scarlet is presented non-selectively in this
way: the scarlet which is existentially equivalent to bloodstained is, in this
poem, as much a permanent characterization of soldiers as is the scarlet that
refers to the colour of their clothes. And since it has the special importance in
the poem that comes from this possibility of double interpretation, we can
argue that its somewhat unexpected intonational treatment underlines that importance.
REDUCED ENGAGEMENT IN READING VERSE
Having thus proposed a reading for these four lines which seems to fit our
expectation of how they would be said as engaged discourse in the particular
context of interaction I have constructed, I must now recognize that there
is at least one other way of reading them which hearers might regard as
equally acceptable. Among a number of people who were asked to read
them, several did, in fact, produce something like this:
//o o WHAT is that SOUND which so thrills the ear //
//o down in the VALley //o DRUMMing //o DRUMMing //
//o ONly the scarlet SOLdiers dear //
//o the SOLdiers coming //This treatment corresponds to what I earlier called Stage 2 engagement.
Tone unit boundaries and the allocation of prominent syllables within the
tone units are exactly as they are in the putative fully engaged version. All
that is different is that level tone takes the place of all the tones that have
interactive significance. The result is a kind of ritualized, stylized presentation
of the poem which is fairly easily recognizable as typical of a great deal of
public verse-reading. In the case of The Quarry’, which is so clearly intended
to be a situated two-part dialogue, such a reduction in engagement might,
perhaps, be said to result in a less satisfying performance. If the alternation
of speaker responding to speaker is held to be part of the experience, then