Chapter 5
The Corpus and its Coding
The previous three chapters have completed what was described in
Chapter 1 as the inward exploration of the grammar. This has been done
both to provide support for the concept of a linear grammar and to
generate questions worthy of further investigation. It has been demon-
strated that neither the intonational systems of key and termination,
nor the intonational system of tone have yet been fully incorporated
within the grammar, and that a more fully complete grammar needs
to notate such systems and features. This chapter describes the
corpus used to test the proposed grammar and details how the lexical
elements were coded. The following two chapters will test the pro-
posed communicative values of tone, and key and terminations within
increments.
5.1 The Corpus and the Readers
The corpus employed consists of eleven readings of two texts originally
produced by Tony Blair. The fi rst, a short televised address (hereinafter
Text 1), was made on the morning of the 7 July 2005 at the G8 summit in
Gleneagles and set out his initial reaction to the London bombings. The
second (hereinafter Text 2) was an improvised answer to a question asking
whether the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon had damaged America’s
standing in the Middle East and was produced during a joint press confer-
ence with President Bush at the White House. Both texts represent instances
of purposeful behaviour in pursuit of a communicative purpose: the fi rst
setting out Blair’s plans to deal with the unexpected crisis and the second
defending his foreign policy and outlining the existential threat that, he
believes, is faced by the West. Texts 1 and 2 were chosen as examples of text