184 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
Jt seeks an active intervention of the target state reached in (35). The
fi nal tone unit expresses a proposition very much in line with the previously
generated discourse expectations. It is clear from the state of speaker/
hearer convergence that the terrorists would oppose progress between
Israel and Palestine as this would reduce the amount of hatred which they
could feed off. In the context no other lexical sense would appear to be
possible in increment fi nal position and hence the fi nal high key/termina-
tion does not realize a particularizing key.
This section has suggested that the values realized by high key in increment
initial, medial and fi nal position may also be realized by the production
of high key/termination. However, only the high-termination value may
have communicative signifi cance because the key value may clash with the
expectations generated both within the increment and by the previous
discourse. In such cases, the key value is redundant and can be ignored
by the hearer. Key only realizes a signifi cant communicative value within
tone units that appear to contain a proposition which is contrastive with
the previous co-text or where it particularizes a lexical sense, while high
termination seemingly always serves to invite a tacit or overt adjudication.
7.3 Low termination, Pitch Sequences and
their Relationship to Increments
Low termination, according to Brazil (1997) releases the hearer from all
expectations, it signals that the speaker neither invites adjudication nor
expects hearer concurrence, and signals the completion of a pitch sequence.
Brazil did not investigate the relationship between pitch sequences and
increments but his comment that pitch sequences are not necessarily coterm-
inous with grammatical sentences or exchanges suggests that pitch sequences
identifi ed solely by low termination may not be coterminous with increments
which are identifi ed by phonological, grammatical and semantic criteria
(1997: 120). However, if his implicit claim that the pitch sequence is a
semantic unit is correct, pitch sequence endings are likely to coincide with
the endings of increments. Brazil (ibid. 119) recognizes that there is ‘a
suggestive similarity between the effect of the low-termination choice and
the end-points of other units that the analyst sets up to deal with different
aspects of linguistic patterning’. In other words, we should expect low ter-
minations to occur either at actual or potential increment boundaries.
Other scholars, (e.g. Tench, 1996; Brown, Currie, and Kenworthy, 1980)
argue that only pitch sequences which are immediately followed by high
key, labelled as ‘sequence chains’ within a Discourse Intonation tradition by
Barr (1990) and Pickering (2004), are of signifi cance for the chunking of