Looking Forward and Practical Applications 205
what to include and what to exclude. This book has demonstrated the
power of describing speech as a series of increments which result in a series
of target states. Each target state functions as an act of telling by conveying
something about the world. Recognition of the added communicative value
realized by high key and high termination and non-falling tone in incre-
ment-initial and fi nal position allows the grammar to code how speakers
signal their expectations and illustrates how they co-operate and compete
in the management of their co-constructed unfolding meaning which is
incrementally produced by their discourse. Yet, more remains to be done: a
fruitful area of future research would appear to be a careful study of sus-
pensive elements in the chains, which appear identical to the proposed
OI chunks in Sinclair and Mauranen (2007), and function not to move the
message on but rather to facilitate the achievement of a target state by
smoothing out the interactive nature of discourse. Such research would be
best undertaken through the investigation of a corpus of conversation.
A further area of interest not touched upon here, and worthy of future
research, is the relationship between increments and turn taking with refer-
ence to discourse units such as adjacency pairs from the Conversation Anal-
ysis tradition (Levinson 1993 and Sacks (1995), and exchanges from the
Discourse Analysis tradition, (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). Intuitively, it
appears that an asking exchange can easily be described as an initiating
increment followed by a responding one with optional speaker feedback.
In Conversation Analysis terms the initiating increment can be viewed as
the fi rst member of an adjacency pair which creates an expectancy of an
appropriate response. However, the relationship between telling incre-
ments and exchanges or adjacency pairs is less clear. Speakers in pursuit of
their individual conversational goals may produce an extended series of
telling increments which result in the achievement of their ultimate telling
and it is unclear whether the series of increments represents one informing
move in an exchange or a series of informing moves.^1 In either case, the
issue arises as how the fi nal telling increment before the turn creates an
expectation that a change of speaker is desired.
This text has argued for the coding of some lexical elements as chunks.
In Chapters 1 and 5 some evidence was presented supporting the view that
tonality selections segment speech into information units. It appears incon-
ceivable that a lexical element can co-exist across more than one informa-
tion unit and so a chunk which is a lexical element is always likely to be
found within an information unit. Recognition that lexical elements are
found within single information units may lead to a more psychologically
accurate coding of elements within increments by distinguishing between
the assembly of increments from chunks and from orthographic words.