38 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
specific, intonationally conveyed meanings to particular words or group
of words.
The description is expressed in terms of pitch choices, though this is
almost certainly a simplification. Intensity and durational features regularly
co-occur with the pitch choices, and it may well turn out that choices described
as being realized by pitch phenomena are being identified by hearers through
associated intensity and durational phenomena—we must never forget
Lieberman’s (1960) experiments on the perception of stress.
Brazil’s description sets out to account both for the paradigmatic options
available to a speaker at any point in the discourse and for the syntagmatic
structures he can build up. He has so far isolated four systems of options,
labelled tone, prominence, key and termination, all of them realized by
pitch phenomena and all potentially realizable in a single syllable. In addition
there are four units of structure, syllable, segment, tone unit, and pitch
sequence, of which the most important is the tone unit. The four intonation
systems all work within and attach meaning to the tone unit; divisions
within utterances are seen to be intonationally and not grammatically motivated
and, like Laver (1970), Brazil thinks that the tone unit, rather than the
clause, is ‘the most likely unit of neurolinguistic pre-assembly’.
The structure of the tone unit
The tone unit has the following structure:
(Proclitic segment) Tonic segment (Enclitic segment)As this structure implies, tone units may consist simply of a tonic segment,
and many do; indeed, a considerable number consist of no more than the
tonic syllable, i.e. the syllable on which there is a major pitch movement, as
in (3) below. Tone unit boundaries will be marked by a double slash, //.
3 // GOOD //; // YES //; // ME //; // JOHN //
Most tone units, of course, do consist of more than the minimal tonic segment,
and then the question of segmentation arises. With the syllables following
the tonic there is, in fact, no analytic problem: even though the pitch movement
of the tone may be continued over succeeding syllables; the tonic segment
is considered to end with, and the enclitic to begin after, the tonic syllable,
as shown in (4).
4 Tonic segment Enclitic segment
// GOOD ness knows //
// YES sir //
// WE did //
// JOHN ny’s coming //
However, while the final boundary of the tonic segment is obviously
unproblematic, recognizing where the tonic segment begins is a more