Increments and Tone 143
There were three increment fi nal rising tones located in the corpus which
coincided with a tone unit containing both nominal/verbal and adverbial
elements. Example (10) is a representative example.
(10) // i am ↑JUST going to make a short STATEment
N V a V' V' d e N
INT1 INT2 INT2 INT2 INT3
to /YOU // on the ↑TERrible e\VENTS // that have
P N P d e N W V
INT4 INT5 INT6 INT7
happened in london earlier to /↓ DAY // [T1-Emi-1]
V' p N A+ A
INT7 INT8 INT9 TS #The elements in the increment fi nal rising tone unit appear in the context
in which they were spoken to have been readily inferable: Text 1 was not an
announcement of the underground bombing it was a reaction to it. Neither
of the other two examples, however, appear to be inferable. It is not clear
that a hearer could infer that the speaker after visiting London would
return to the Geight summit not is it inferable what the speaker’s unstated
error is.
To summarize the position reached so far, increment fi nal rising tones func-
tion in the grammar to foster social convergence by (nominally) deferring to
the hearer. When the increment fi nal rising tone coincides with an adverbial
element the adverbial qualifi es the target state realized by the increment.
The most common increment end-rising tone found in the corpus,
however, was not the rise but the fall-rise. Unlike Brazil (1995) most schol-
ars ascribe specifi c communicative functions to utterance fi nal fall-rises.
Kingdon (1958: 59–60) and Halliday 1967: 27) argue that an utterance fi nal
fall-rise conveys an extra implication while O’Connor and Arnold (1973:
68–9) label an utterance fi nal fall-rise a contrast or concession. In other
words, an utterance-fi nal fall-rise conveys an unspoken insinuation but
also assumes that the hearer can work out the additional message from the
context (Tench 1996: 84) and (Wells 2006: 27).
In the corpus there were 156 increment fi nal fall-rises which are listed
in Table 6.5.
Many of the readers selected a fall-rise attached to the same elements in
increment fi nal position which indicates that some though not all of them
construed the meaning of the texts in a similar manner. When reading the