138 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
illusion of a more equalitarian management of the discourse. The hearer,
as an equal, technically has the right to validate the speaker’s assertion and
the speaker recognizes this apparent right by producing the increment
fi nal interpersonal rise. Successful communication, as Eggins and Slade
(1997) remind us, rests upon the tension between establishing solidarity by
confi rming similarities and creating autonomy by highlighting differences
through the act of telling. One of the ways a speaker can reduce tension is
by projecting divergence/telling as convergence or projecting the telling as
potentially inferable by the hearer.
In addition to managing the tension between telling and fostering solid-
arity interpersonal fi nal rises function to manage the discourse by checking
whether the hearer is following the speaker’s discourse. An analysis of the
Crystal and Davy (1975) corpus in O’Grady (2006) found that fi ve out of
the twenty-four interpersonal rises located were immediately followed by
the back channel m: a response which Tench (1996: 105) states, signals
hearer agreement.
All the remaining instances of increments in the corpus which ended in
end-rising tone were attached to tone units which contained elements
which led to the creation of a target state. Brazil (1987 and 1995) does not
ascribe any additional communicative signifi cance to end-rising tone found
in increment fi nal position: they are, he claims, simply tone units which
contain information which the speaker projects as already part of the
speaker/hearer state of convergence. For Brazil, the position of the end-
rising tone unit within the increment is immaterial. He claims that in incre-
ment fi nal position end-rising tone coincides with the production of
elements which while informationally redundant are required syntactically
to complete an appropriate chain. Other scholars, however, do ascribe spe-
cifi c and differing communicative functions to utterance fi nal rises for
example Cruttenden (1997: 95) who argues that utterance fi nal rises limit
or modify the previous information.
An utterance or speaker’s turn^1 is not necessarily coterminous with an
increment. An utterance may consist of more than a single increment, less
than a single increment, or be a single increment. However, except where the
speaker’s utterance is either part of an asking increment or a non-fi nal con-
tribution to a jointly constructed telling increment, the ending of a speaker’s
utterance is likely to coincide with the completion of an increment.^2
In order to investigate whether increment fi nal rises function to limit or
modify the information told in the increment the 49 increment fi nal rises
were divided into rises attached to a tone unit containing only adverbial
elements^3 and those that were attached to tone units containing nominal or
verbal elements. The results are presented in Table 6.3.