A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

166 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse

which can describe the democracy of the people to the target state achieved by the
production of example (12).
To conclude this subsection it has been shown that increment initial high
key tends to label an increment as being contrary to the previously gener-
ated expectations. Ninety-fi ve per cent of increment initial high keys in
Texts 1 and 2 project a context where the content of the increment is con-
trary to the previously generated discourse expectations or signal the intro-
duction of a fresh topic into the discourse. We have seen that increment
initial high keys may realize the independent communicative value of par-
ticularizing a particular lexical sense.

7.1.2 High key in non-increment initial position

This sub-section explores the communicative signifi cance of high key in
non-increment initial position. According to Brazil (1997) high key serves
to label a tone unit as contrary to the previously generated expectations
and/or to particularize a lexical sense selection by presenting the lexical
item as a selection from an existential paradigm which consists of two mem-
bers; the lexical item opposed to all other conceivable senses which could
have been selected. Table 7.3 details the high keys which were found in
non-increment initial position.^8
The communicative value of all 65 examples of non-increment initial
high keys was examined in order to investigate whether each individual
high key operated in a domain larger than the tone unit. The fi ndings are
summarized in Table 7.4.

Table 7.3 Non-increment initial high key

Text 1 Text 2 Total

Medial high key 15 28 43

Final high key 2 20 22

Total 17 48 65

Table 7.4 The communicative value of non-increment initial high key

Text 1 Text 2

TU contrary to

expectations

Particularizing

key

Other TU contrary to

expectations

Particularizing

key

Other

Medial 1 13 1 7 13 8
Final 2 0 0 16 4 0