Key and Termination – Increments 175
discourse which, depending on the circumstances, may range from active
verbal adjudication to non-verbal gestures. Speakers require such interven-
tion in order to reassure themselves that their view of the state of shared
speaker/hearer understanding is correct and that the realization of their
increment resulted in the achievement of a satisfactory target state.
In the corpus 52.5 per cent of the instances of high termination identifi ed
within the corpus occurred at positions within the increment other than
increment fi nal and the next sub-section shows how such instances of high
termination realize communicative value within the increment.
7.2.2 High termination in other positions within the increment
Brazil (1995:13) observes that speech is characteristically produced element
by element, an observation that implies that it is produced tone unit by
tone unit. Prior to the production of an increment the interlocutors are at
an initial state, a term which, as we have seen, does not imply a blank state
but rather refers to the amount of convergence between the interlocutors’
assumptions. It is a state of affairs largely created by the prior discourse; the
interlocutors’ common discourse history; and their previous individual
experiences as members of the same speech community. To illustrate, prior
to the production of the initial tone unit in (22) Mh has told that that there
was a terrorist attack in London which had resulted in an unknown number
of casualties. The hearer has further been told that at the time of the state-
ment that the situation is confused and that no complete conclusions can
as of yet be drawn.
(22) and our THOUGHTS and \↑PRAyers //
c d N c dº N
of \COURSE // are with the VICtims and their \↓FAmilies //
a V P d N c d N #[T1-Mh-6]
The increment initial high termination projects a context which invites
hearers to actively consider the content of the tone unit. They know that
the chain can only achieve target state through the production of further
VN, VA or VE elements, etc. They are being invited to make an active inter-
vention prior to a point they recognize as the potential completion of an
increment. The increment initial high termination invites them to focus on
the importance of the content of the initial tone unit which serves to foster