Key and Termination – Increments 159
minimal increments; increments which themselves consist of a single tone
unit, and which cannot be used to establish an independent communicative
value for high key in increments separate from the value established for
high key in tone units. Of this subset of 50 high keys three, or 6 per cent, did
not support the hypothesis. It is not in fact surprising that some instances of
high keys and even some in minimal increments do not conform to the
hypothesis. A high-key selection represents a speaker’s projection that what
he/she says contains information which the hearer will fi nd surprising.
Speakers may underestimate (whether by design or not) the state of conver-
gence shared with their hearers or for their own rhetorical purposes present
unsurprising information as surprising. This point will be revisited below.
In Text 1 of the 60 increment initial high keys which labelled the content
of the increment as being contrary to the previously generated discourse
expectations, nine were located in a minimal increment. Of the remaining
51 increment initial high keys, 43 were found within tone units which
themselves did not contain suffi cient information to realize a putative act
of telling. The initial tone units contained 25 elements coterminous with
relational or projecting clauses which were themselves tactically related to
the immediately following clauses; ten nominal groups and eight instances
where the string of elements within the tone unit was not coterminous with
a syntactic category. Examples 1 to 3 illustrate:
(1) it ’s par↑TICularly bar\BAric // that THIS has \HAPpened // on
N V A E W+ N V V' p
a /DAY //when PEople are meeting to \TRY // to HELP the
d N W dº N V V' V' V' d
PROblems of POverty in \AFrica // and the LONG term
N P+ N P N c Ø d e
↓PROblems of \CLImate change // in the en\↓VIronment //
n P+ N P d N #
[Gc-16]Table 7.2 The communicative value of increment initial high key
Text 1 Text 2 Total
Contrastive discourse expectations 60 77 137
Fresh topic/punctuation move 44 77 121
None of the above 7 6 13