Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

42 Advances in spoken discourse analysis

common ground, whereas by choosing proclaiming tone he is indicating his
expectation that the area of common ground will be enlarged, as a result of
the speaker being told something he didn’t already know.
In the following examples we can see the effect of altering the tone
selections:

In (14) the hearer is told when someone will have her twentieth birthday—
the tone choice marks that the birthday is a shared topic and that the new
information is the date. In (15), by contrast, the date is already known, what
is new is how old she will be. In each case, the assumed focus of interest
is referred to and the new assertion is proclaimed. It must, however, be
stressed that what is referred to may not have been made explicit; in other
words referring tone allows a speaker to call on shared knowledge and
opinions which have not so far been verbalized in the conversation.

Key choices

In addition to making choices in the tone and prominence systems, a
speaker must also, for each and every tone unit, select relative pitch or
key from a three-term system: high, mid and low. However, unlike Sweet
(1906), Brazil does not see mid key as the norm for the speaker’s voice;
rather key choices are made and recognized with reference to the key of
the immediately preceding tone unit. In other words, there are no absolute
values for high, mid and low key, even for a particular speaker; in fact,
a given high key tone unit may well be at a lower pitch than an earlier
mid key one. However, as we noted earlier, the phenomenon of the
continually varying reference point is already well attested in analyses
of tone languages.
Key choice is realized on the first prominent syllable of the tonic segment
and adds a meaning that can be glossed at the most general level as:

High key contrastive

Mid key additive

Low key equative

The way in which these intonational meanings combine with lexico-grammatical
ones is discussed in detail in Brazil et al. (1980) and Brazil (1985/1992) but
can be simply illustrated with the invented examples in (16a, b, c) below,
where only key is varied. (In all subsequent examples the double slashes,
//, mark the mid key line; items that are in high or low key are printed
above or below this not(at)ional line.)