136 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
Section 6.2 explores the communicative signifi cance of rising tone
in increment fi nal position by examining Halliday’s (1967) claim that
utterance end-rising tones project uncertainty: the speaker signals that
the hearer is the party with the greater knowledge. It goes on to consider
whether increment fi nal fall-rises consistently realize the additional com-
municative function of implying that something has been left unsaid.
Finally it examines the communicative signifi cance of the increment fi nal
level tones.
Chapter 3 described a proposal which argues that in discourse some
instances of level tones which are not the result of dysfl uencies are instances
of used language. Brazil (1997), in contrast, classifi es level tone as oblique
and argues that as level tone is not sensitive to the details of a hearer’s
perspective it is not used language. Section 6.3 investigates level tones found
in the corpus in order to examine whether any instances of level tone which
labelled information as ‘self evident’ were present (see Tench 1997), and if
they were whether they should be notated as used language.
6.1 Non-End-Falling Tone in Increment Final Position
This section fi rst explores whether rises in increment fi nal position func-
tioned, within the corpus, as tones of social inclusiveness. Did they signal a
deferring to the hearer? Two hundred and nine end-rising tone increments
were located in the corpus which meant that 22.8 per cent of all increments
were completed by a tone unit with an end-rising tone. There were 146 cases
where the fi nal tone was a fall-rise and 63 where it was a rise.
Prior to examining the communicative signifi cance of increment fi nal
end-rising tone there must be a brief digression discussing the status of
the lexical elements contained within the fi nal end-rising tone units. Unlike
this book, Brazil (1995: 214–15), does not code ‘miscellaneous elements
like well, anyway, and I mean’ because such elements do not enter into
the organization of chains. Using different terminology, we can say that
Brazil (1995) does not code such miscellaneous elements because they
do not convey experiential meaning; rather, they convey either textual or
Table 6.2 Non-end-falling tones in increment
fi nal position
Rise Level Fall-rise
Text 1 9 1 49
Text 2 54 2 97