Notes
Chapter 1
(^1) Brazil does not present any biographical data on the speaker. Neither does he
present a complete transcription of the ‘urban myth’ which includes intonation.
Nor does he provide a recording. As a result it is not possible to check the
accuracy of Brazil’s segmentation of the ‘urban myth’ into meaningful semantic
units he dubbed increments.
(^2) It is true that while tone units can be reliably identifi ed in a stretch of speech,
there are occasions when the exact boundaries of individual tone units are
ambiguous. This, however, is not of signifi cance because syllables at the margins
of tone units in these instances are not of communicative signifi cance. For
instance it is immaterial whether non-prominent syllables after the tonic syllable
are notated as being in the tail or in the pre-head of the following tone unit.
Brazil (1997: 13) and Greaves (2006: 1004) note that all of the communicatively
signifi cant elements in the tone unit are found between the onset and the tonic.
(^3) In an earlier study O’Grady (2006) reinterpreted the conversational corpus pub-
lished in Crystal and Davy into increments and found that smallest number of
complete tone units in an increment was 1, the largest 13 with a mean of 3.1. It
seems likely that the reason for the higher mean number of tone units found
within increments in Text 1 is because Text 1 alone originated in the written
form. The issue of whether or not there is a limit to the number of tone units
which can be found within an increment, while of interest, is outside the scope of
the present work.
(^4) Readers who are nervous about the seeming abandonment of clauses in a
des criptive grammar may be reassured to note that numerous scholars such
as Chafe (1994), Crystal (1969), Halliday (1967) and Halliday and Greaves
(2008) have all noted the close correspondence between tone units and clauses
or other grammatical units such as noun groups, adverbial groups etc.
(^5) Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), like Halliday’s earlier work on intonation
(1967, 1970), use the term tone group and not tone unit to describe a stretch of
speech which contains one major pitch movement. However, in Halliday’s most
recent writing on intonation (Halliday and Greaves 2008) he uses the term tone
unit and as this is also the term preferred by Brazil I have adopted the term
throughout this book.
(^6) This claim is neutral as to whether all information units have to be pre-assembled
in working memory or whether, as Wray (2002: 263) implies, the content of some