150 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
(15b) it s the CHAIN reaction that terror brings
N V d N w N V
INT1 INT2 INT3 INT4 INT5
\ WITH it // [T2-Sn-23]
P N #
TSAll the readers except Jt, and Dmc who produced a fi nal fall-rise, produced
an increment fi nal falling tone. Thus, we can see that the context most
readers projected in (15) was one to which they needed to move the hearer’s
cognitive environment. Only Jt, however, overtly asserted his commitment
to the target state realized which can be paraphrased as the act of terror in
isolation is not of importance, it is the reaction which the act sets off which leads to a
spiral of violence which is of importance. The local meaning of Jt’s selection of
increment fi nal rise-fall is to signal that he is not prepared to brook any
criticism of the assertion achieved by the target state.
This section has shown that, contra to Brazil (1995), the selection of an
increment fi nal marked tone does not simply mean that the non-falling
tone coincided with informationally redundant elements required to formally
realize a successful run-through of the chaining rules. Increment fi nal-rises
and fall-rises function to manage the telling achieved by the target state by
projecting social convergence between the speaker and the hearer and by
downplaying the disjunction caused by an act of telling.
6.2 Level Tone in Increments
Brazil (1995: 255) argued that his grammar was one of used language,
language which ‘results from a preoccupation with satisfying some kind of
communicative need’. He distinguished used language from oblique ori-
entation, which is signalled by the presence of level tone by claiming that:
This [oblique orientation] is not used language in the sense in which we
have used the term, because its presentation is not sensitive, in a moment
by moment way, to the details of a hearer’s perspective. (ibid. 244)Brazil (1997) argues that level tone signals an oblique orientation and
hence cannot be used language. This view, however, appears to oppose his
earlier description of one of the communicative functions level tone realizes,
namely that of labelling the content of a tone unit as retrospective summary;