48 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
36 D: What were you doing at the time?
P: Coming home in the car.
I felt a tight pain in the middle of the chest.
D: // TIGHT pain //
P. // YOU KNOW // like a – // DULL ACHE //
There are two significant points about these observations: firstly, although
the items with mid or high termination are initiating and in some sense
questioning, the pitch movement on the tonic is falling, not rising as is
frequently claimed in intonation manuals; in other words, it is definitely
termination and not tone choice which carries the eliciting function; secondly,
it is now possible to identify the function of these items through the phonological
criteria which realize them and there is no need to draw on assumptions
about speaker’s and hearer’s knowledge or A-events and B-events, as suggested
in Labov (1972).
As philosophers have frequently pointed out, the two major assumptions
underlying commands are that the speaker has the right to tell the listener
to do x and that the listener is, in the most general sense, willing to do x.
From what has been said here about termination choices, key concord, and
the meaning of choices in the key system, one would expect commands to
end with a mid termination choice, looking for a mid key agreeing ‘yes’,
‘surely’, ‘certainly’. It is thus quite fascinating to discover that most classroom
instructions, even those in a series and to the whole class, when no
acknowledgement is possible or expected, also end with mid termination,
symbolically predicting the absent agreement:
37 // FOLD your ARMS // LOOK at the WINdow // LOOK at the
CEILIng // LOOK at the FLOOR // LOOK at the DOOR //
It is also instructive, if not worrying, to realize that when parents and
teachers become irritated because their instructions are being ignored, they
typically switch to high termination which paradoxically allows for the high
key contrastive refusal:
38 Mother: // PUT it DOWN // Child: // NO i WON’T //
The pitch sequence
We noted earlier that the particular significance of low termination is that
it does not place any constraints on a succeeding utterance. When we examine
sequences of tone units it becomes useful to regard all the tone units occurring
between two successive low terminations as comprising a phonological unit
which Brazil has called the ‘pitch sequence’.
Pitch sequences are often closely associated with topic: speakers appear
to use a drop to low termination to signal that a particular mini-topic is
ended. The next pitch sequence may begin in mid or high key; a mid key