A Linear Grammar of Speech 109
(54) it wasn’t really... it defi nitely wasn’t a little old lady
N V a... N a V d e e NThe... coding appears to adequately capture the dysfl uency in (54). The
speaker starts a chain but abandons it in order to backtrack and include a
more powerful A element. In (53) the speaker has completed a run through
of the chaining rules before realizing that he/she has not produced an
utterance which fulfi ls the speaker’s communicative need. The speaker
then produces further elements which lead to the achievement of target
state. However, the... coding obscures the fact that the speaker in (53) has
not abandoned an increment. Therefore it is suggested that the example
should be coded as follows:
(55) she hadn’t locked the car... presumably she hadn’t
N V V' d N a N V ØThe coding in (55) without the... coding on the grammar line represents
the fact that the speaker has run through two grammatical chains in order
to reach the required target state.
Substitution
The speaker substitutes a previously uttered element with a following
element, e.g. (56) from Brazil (ibid. 212) demonstrates:
(56) she didn’t say... didn’t know where it was
N V... V W+ N VAgain the... coding in the grammar line appears to suggest erroneously
that the speaker has abandoned the increment. In fact the speaker appears
to have decided to substitute a V element for a previously uttered one within
the same increment. The substitution of the second V element for the fi rst
cancels and replaces the intermediate state produced by the earlier V ele-
ment. In order to make the replacement of an intermediate state transpar-
ent in the grammatical coding it is suggested that example (56) be recoded
as (57) below:
(57) she didn’t say... didn’t know where it was
N (V) V W+ N V