The Corpus and its Coding 117
The eleven readers consisted of six males and fi ve females. There
were four undergraduate students, four students studying for their MA
and three doctoral students. The entire corpus is 61.3 minutes long
and comprises 2,905 tone units which form 931 increments. Table 5.1
summarizes the relevant information about the readers and their readings
of both texts.^3
In order to investigate whether there was more variation between the
number of tone groups and increments produced by the eleven readers in
Text 1 or in Text 2 the raw numbers were converted into standard scores.
There proved to be no difference in variation between the numbers of tone
units and increments produced by the readers in either text. This indicates
that despite the greater diffi culty in constructing the meaning of Text 2,
which unlike Text 1 does not fully subscribe to a standard written grammar,
the readers’ tonality selections and their decisions on the placement of
increment boundaries varied within a relatively narrow window.^4 The charts
shown in Figures 5.1–5.4 below suggest that the size of tone units refl ects
the systemic choices each individual reader made when projecting the
meaning of the texts they read aloud.^5 The issue of variation between read-
ings will be discussed more fully in Section 5.2.1 below and in the following
two chapters.
Table 5.1 The readers and their readings
Text 1 Text 2Reader Sex Education Time* Number of
tone units
Number of
incrementsTime Number of
tone unitsNumber of
incrementsBc M PhD 106 92 20 257 196 63
Bs M PhD 91 92 20 219 213 73
Dc F MA 107 89 20 293 201 68
Dmc F MA 134 79 19 319 179 64
Emi F BA 89 84 19 225 197 56
Gc M BA 88 86 21 206 189 66
Jt M BA 108 81 21 202 163 62
Mh M BA 77 75 19 208 157 60
Rf F MA 85 67 20 215 154 65
Sn F PhD 86 80 20 217 179 66
Tr M MA 93 78 20 253 174 69
Total 1064 903 219 2614 2002 712
*The time is given in seconds which are rounded up or down to the nearest complete second.