158 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
Text 1 into intonation paragraphs containing distinct topics than they did
the less pre-planned Text 2.
Tench (1996: 28) states that, while possible, intonational paragraphing is
rare in spontaneous discourse. This view is supported by the fi nding that
while 74.6 per cent of low terminations were in increment fi nal position
only 9.4 per cent and 7.9 per cent of increments in Texts 1 and 2 contained
increment fi nal low termination.^3 This indicates that the readers found the
textual structure of Text 2 to be more challenging. However, regardless of
the diffi culties in interpreting the textual structure, each and every high
key in increment initial position realizes a communicative value. The fol-
lowing subsection examines the communicative value realized by reader
selection of high key in the corpus.
7.1.1 High key in increment initial position
The discussion in Chapter 2 Section 3 led to the formation of a proposal
that increment initial high key labels the content of an increment as being
contrary to the expectations previously generated by the discourse: it
signals the introduction of a fresh and unexpected topic, event or charac-
ter, or labels the information contained within the increment as being
unanticipated, surprising or startling. All high keys located in increment
initial position were examined and classifi ed as either supporting the
proposal, confl icting with the proposal or unclassifi able; the fi ndings are
summarized in Table 7.2.
It can be seen that only 13 high keys or 4.8 per cent of high keys found in
the corpus did not conform to the hypothesis. Fifty high keys occurred in
Table 7.1 Number of high keys in increment initial, medial and fi nal position
Text 1 Text 2Reader Initial Medial Final Total Initial Medial Final Total
Bc 5 1 0 6 6 2 1 9
Bs 16 2 0 18 18 1 1 20
Dc 14 3 0 17 22 3 4 29
Dmc 11 1 1 13 17 3 1 21
Emi 8 1 0 9 12 3 1 16
Gc 5 0 0 5 11 5 0 16
Jt 14 0 0 14 15 4 2 21
Mh 8 0 0 8 14 3 0 17
Rf 10 0 1 11 15 2 4 21
Sn 8 6 0 14 8 0 3 11
Tr 10 1 0 11 21 2 3 26
Total 110 15 2 126 159 28 20 207