Key and Termination – Increments 191
His repetition of the tone unit the value of terrorism coupled with the
presence of level tone and the signifi cant following pause indicates his
detachment from the communicative act of reading aloud. Instead he
appears to have been struggling to make sense of the text. The low termina-
tion appears to indicate that he momentarily felt that he had reached a
point of closure before realizing that he had in fact not done so.
To conclude, it seems that low termination tends to overwhelmingly
coincide with the closure of a potential semantic unit (identifi ed by a run
through of the chaining rules) and that this potential semantic unit is
usually an increment. It seems likely that where a low termination appeared
in a non-increment fi nal position the reader had for one reason or another
struggled to make sense of the text. It is also worth remembering Tench’s
(1996) observation that intonational paragraphing, while possible in
spontaneous discourse, is rare means that the proposed phonological
hierarchy set out in Figure 7.3 may be restricted to planned discourses.
7.3.1 Low key and low key/termination
Table 7.11 shows that there were very few instances of low key found in the
corpus. In other words, low key appears to represent a rare selection. This
subsection will fi rst explicate the communicative function of low key within
and between increments. The paucity of occurrences of low key means
that any conclusions formed must remain extremely tentative. Finally the
communicative value of low key/termination will be examined in order to
see whether the position of the low key/termination in the increment tends
to determine whether the low-key or low-termination values predominate.
Table 7.11 Number of low keys in increment initial, medial and fi nal position
Text 1 Text 2Reader Initial Medial Final Total Initial Medial Final Total
Bc 0 1 0 1 2 0 1 3
Bs 0 1 1 2 1 1 0 2
Dc 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1
Dmc 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Emi 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gc 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 2
Jt 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1
Mh 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
Rf 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0
Sn 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Tr 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Total 0 4 1 5 4 3 3 10