The Corpus and its Coding 129
The coding of the elements managed to create as V'PHR focuses attention on
the fact that the journalist created riots. Create carries the main semantic
weight of the message in contrast to tried to create or failed to create which
would not have been coded as VPHR.
The sole example where verbs in phase occurred in more than one tone
unit in the Crystal and Davy corpus is:
(20) Extract 6 (Living in London)
and \EVerything seems // to get \/DIRty //
c N VPHR EWhile the tonality selection suggests that seems to get is VV' sequence, to get
dirty is clearly the main carrier of information which indicates that VPHR
is a more appropriate coding. It is possible, however, that the coding of
example (20) is no more than an artefact of an incorrect tonality division.
As there is no pause between everything and seems it may be that seems which
is neither stressed not prominent, is a proclitic element in the second tone
unit rather than an enclitic element in the initial tone unit, and thus, the
tonality division should have been coded as // and \EVerything // seems to
get \/DIRty //.^12
PHR-V coding was also suggested for the V-ing pattern when it signalled
potential futurity. However, no examples were found in the corpus or in
Crystal and Davy (1975) and so nothing further can be said about the
coding of the V-ing pattern. To conclude, it has been shown that the
PHR-V coding helps to make the grammar more semantically transparent
in the case of elements which represent a single meaningful selection and
when V elements are in phase.
5.4.2 The coding of N elements
In Chapter 4 Section 3 Brazil’s coding of certain N elements, e.g. car park,
as a pair of reduplicating N elements was criticized. It was argued that
elements such as car park represented single lexical selections and that a
more transparent as well as psychologically accurate grammar should code
them as single N elements. The full list of N elements which contain more
than a single orthographic word found in the corpus and coded as a single
N element is as follows: emergency services, climate change, September the 11th on
fi ve occasions, chain reaction and Middle East. As expected all instances of