Chapter 8
Reviewing Looking Forward and
Practical Applications
8.1 Aims and Findings of the Research
This book set out to review Brazil’s exploratory descriptive grammar of
used language by exploring the assumptions upon which it was built and
by testing the descriptive accuracy of the grammar against different data.
Brazil (1995) developed the rules of his grammar in a short monologic
corpus while this book applied and extended his fi ndings by examining
how different readers’ intonational selections construed read aloud text.
This book set out to investigate whether Brazil’s chaining rules adequately
described how speakers fulfi l their individual communicative needs and to
explicitly incorporate the intonation systems of tone, key and termination
within the grammar.
The fi rst point to consider is Brazil’s claim that meaning emerges incre-
mentally; used language is formed out of increments – stretches of speech
which fulfi l two necessary but not suffi cient criteria: one intonational,
the other syntactic. However, while satisfaction of the two criteria is likely
to result in the production of an increment it does not always have to.
Successful satisfaction of an increment is ultimately dependent on whether
the speaker has told something which has matched the hearer’s informational
needs. Identifi cation of increments in discourse by an analyst is, therefore,
inherently probabilistic.
Brazil (1995) has demonstrated that his proposed grammar elegantly
captures how language unfolds into increments which succeed in moving
hearers from initial to target states. The target state of the previous incre-
ment is the initial state of the subsequent one. Such a defi nition, while
appropriate for Brazil’s corpus proved not to be entirely incontrovertible in
the data studied. Increments were located where the readers suspended
their production of a modifying increment in order to backtrack and insert