148 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
on a \↑DAY // when people are \MEEting // to TRY and HELP
P d N W d ̊ N V V' V' c V'
the PROblems of \POverty // in \↑AFrica // and thed N P+ N P N c d
LONG TERM PROblems of \CLImate change //
e N P+ N
in the en–VIronment // [T1-Dmc-14]
P d N #It is clear that the target state reached after the production of the fi nal
level tone unit which contains an adverbial would not have differed much,
if at all, had the speaker not produced the fi nal tone unit. In order to
investigate the meaning of Dmc’s choice it is worth considering the mean-
ings realized by the other readers. Five of them did not place the adverbial
elements in the environment in its own tone unit. All of these readers selected
the unmarked fall to realize the increment boundary. They read the stretch
of speech comprising the fi nal two units in (13) as a single increment. Of
the remaining fi ve readers one produced a fall which, coupled with a
low-termination choice, projected increment closure; three produced a
fall-rise, thus implying that the target state realized more than was overtly
stated; and one produced a rise, which not only projected the meaning that
the problem of climate change is limited to the physical location of the environment
but also defers to the hearer.
By selecting level tone Dmc has chosen an option which realizes the value
of none of the choices chosen by the other readers. Her choice projects an
increment where the achieved target state is not presented as an unmit-
igated telling, a telling with an implication or a telling mitigated by an
assumed deference to the hearer’s cognitive environment. Thus, it appears
that Dmc has refused to make a choice: she has neither told, told and
implied, nor told and deferred. A local meaning might be that she projects
the telling realized in the increment as one she that she does not endorse.
The fi nal systemic option available to a speaker in Figure 6.1 is selection
of an increment fi nal rise-fall tone. Brazil (1997: 84ff.) claims that the rise-
fall is a variant of the fall which a speaker selects to project dominance. By
asserting dominance ‘the speaker is able to make a meaning distinction
that the non-dominant speaker cannot make’ (ibid. 85). For Halliday 1967
and Halliday and Greaves (2008) a rise fall (their tone 5) realizes speaker
commitment or intensifi cation. The speaker projects him/herself as
strongly committed to the asserted proposition. The target state realized