Chapter 7
Key and Termination Within and
Between Increments
This chapter focuses on exploring the added communicative signifi cance
realized by non-mid key and non-mid termination in increments found
within the corpus. This is done in order to test whether the communicative
values proposed in the earlier chapters are supported by the corpus. The
chapter is divided into three sections. Using illustrative examples taken
from the corpus, Sections 1 and 2 explore the communicative signifi cance
of high key and high termination in increment initial, medial and fi nal
position. Section 3 sketches the communicative signifi cance of low key
and low termination in increments, primarily by focusing on the putative
relationship between increments and pitch sequences.
7.1 The Communicative Signifi cance of
High Key in Increments
Table 7.1 sets out the number of high-key choices made by the eleven
readers, broken down into increment initial, medial and fi nal position
located in the corpus.^1
Two things are apparent from Table 7.1. The fi rst is that as expected
higher pitched peaks tend to coincide with the beginnings rather than the
endings of increments with 80.5 per cent of high keys occurring in incre-
ment initial position. The second is that this tendency is more pronounced
in Text 1 where 86.7 per cent of high keys compared with 76.8 per cent
of high keys in Text 2 are in increment initial position. Furthermore
in Text 1 12.2 per cent of all increments had initial high key while only
7.9 per cent of increments in Text 2 had initial high key.^2 This indicates
as expected that the readers appeared to consider Text 1 to be more
pre-planned than Text 2. Hence the readers found it easier to segment