A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

130 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse

N elements containing more than a single orthographic word were found
within the same tone unit.
One further element walking away was coded as NPHR:

(21) but it is not a reason for walking away

c N V a d N P NPHR #

INT1 INT2 INT3 TS

Coding the element walking away as a NPHR rather than as an NA sequence
serves not only to highlight that target state has been reached but also to
highlight the negative consequences of the act of walking away rather than
the physical act of walking away from somewhere.

5.4.3 PHR elements

During the coding of the corpus it became clear that not every element
could be usefully coded as an N, V, P, A or E element. A number of disparate
elements, presented below in Table 5.3, were coded as PHR. This section
considers the meaning generated by the PHR elements and how to include
PHR elements within the chaining rules.
As can be seen, the elements coded as PHR represent a mixed bag
semantically: some such as I think, I mean and I’m afraid function to limit
or downplay the utterance while others such as as best I can and at all
emphasise, and others such as and so on indicate a lack of specifi city,
while for example specifi es. The elements face to face and shoulder to
shoulder add colour by highlighting direct physical contact. The fact
that the elements coded as PHR represent a mixed bag is of little surprise
in that PHR elements all convey circumstantial meaning rather than
the main action represented within the increment. Within the corpus

Table 5.3 A list of all elements coded as PHR

as best I can a little bit later whatever they do
I think (twice) I’m afraid I mean
thank you for example (twice) in other words
at all (4 times) and so on no matter
face to face shoulder to shoulder