A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

132 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse

were used to highlight a semantic similarity and to make the workings of
the chaining rules less opaque. The coding exclamation (ex) was used to
notate lexical elements which directly signalled the speaker’s feelings, that
of convention (con) for non decomposable elements which are used to
ensure and focus hearer attention.
Within increments exclamations such as erm or conventions such as you
know, and look failed to create a further intermediate state and so were
coded as suspensions unless the element was the fi nal element in the incre-
ment. Example (23) illustrates:

(23) you can see it in Chechnya you know

N V V' N P N CON (#)

INT1 INT2 INT3 INT4 TS

look in a small way we lived through that

con p d e n N VPHR N

INT1 INT2 INT3

in Northern Ireland

P N (#)

TS

you know it ’s nonsense

con N V N (#)

INT1 INT2 TS

In the example the elements coded as con do not create a new intermediate
state. The increment fi nal you know is coded as if it represents the realiza-
tion of target state: as the fi nal element in the increment it represents the
culmination of the projected set of modifi ed circumstances which the
speaker intended to tell the hearer.
The fi nal minor category identifi ed in the corpus was numeral. Quirk et
al. (1985: 73) describe numeral as a minor lexical class which contains both
cardinal and ordinal numbers. Examples found in the corpus are tens, tens
of thousands, two and one. Within increments num elements functioned as
e elements which suspend but do not exhaust the speaker’s obligation to
produce a further N element.

5.5 Ellipsis

In Chapter 4 it was argued that the chaining rules in Brazil (1995), which
predict the overt realization of predictable lexical elements, are an