110 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
The fi rst V element is bracketed to highlight that ultimately it did not result
in the creation of an intermediate state which led to the achievement of the
target state.
This section has suggested ways of coding dysfl uencies which fi lter them
out in order to highlight the workings of the chains. It has not attempted
to look at utterance-fi nal pauses because such pauses do not affect the
operation of the chaining rules.^26
4.4.3 Summary
This section has evaluated how Brazil’s grammar of used language deals
with two language features. It was argued that speakers usually realize predict-
able lexical items elliptically. Recognition that speakers produce the most
economical messages allows for the prediction of likely occurrences of
ellipsis. Some instances of dysfl uencies were shown to disrupt the order
of Brazil’s chains and possible codings were suggested which allow the
workings of the chains to be made more transparent.
4.5 Inconsistencies in the Coding
This section briefl y describes and discusses minor inconsistencies in the
fi nal and presumably defi nitive transcript found in Brazil (1995: 215–18).
On line 2 (page 215) we fi nd:
(57) and she came back to this multi-storey car park
# & N V A+ P d e N+ N......Of interest is the coding of car park (see also driveway line 45 and backseat
line 51)^27 as reduplicating N elements. Cobuild notates all three lexical
elements as N elements. In line with the previous discussion in Section 3 on
the extent of slot fi lling elements, this book accepts and follows the Cobuild
classifi cation of some multi-word N elements as single N elements. This is
because elements such as car park, driveway and backseat represent single
meaningful lexical selections irrespective of how they are spelt.
The next point to be considered is how increment boundaries were
marked. As there is no recourse to original recordings or intonation tran-
scriptions it is impossible to comment on how the increment boundaries in
Brazil (1995) were marked. To illustrate, on line 23 (Brazil 1995: 216) and
sees her hands is notated as an increment but on line 3 (ibid. 215) and it was