230 Notes
radio news broadcast which was laid out in orthographic sentences and thus,
unlike more spontaneous forms of speech, can be divided into sentences.(^19) See the discussion of example (44a) which shows that because high-termination
anticipates a high-key response, the speaker presents his/her information as sur-
prising to the hearer.
(^20) The part of the tone group prior to the tonic syllable which can contain both
stressed and unstressed syllables.
(^21) Esser devotes little space to describing the communicative function of key. He
merely notes that high-key is used to mark the beginning of a new topic while
low-key ‘strengthens the subordinating function’. He makes no claims about
mid-key. Key is not involved, he claims, in the ‘presentation structure of a text’.
(ibid. 80). It is not clear from Esser’s transcriptions if his ‘nuclear keys’ (termina-
tions) represent tonic syllables in extended or minimal tonic segments.
(^22) In an investigation of the intonation of solicited, i.e. prepared oral narratives,
Wennerstrom (2001b) argues that ‘pitch maxima’ (intonational high points)
associate with emotionally prioritized text. She claims that the ‘pitch maxima’
project the speaker’s view of which ‘parts of the story are most salient’ (ibid.
1187). While her views appear similar to Esser’s it is not clear if the pitch maxima
identifi ed by Wennerstrom coincide with Esser’s ‘nuclear key’.
(^23) // represents a tone unit boundary. ↑ and ↓ indicate high and low-termination
respectively. / and \ indicate rising and falling tone respectively. The diacritic ‘>’
indicates that the content of a tone unit is more important than that of a follow-
ing tone unit. The.. are used to represent the content of the tone unit.
(^24) It will be shown on pp. 102–106 that the coding set out in Brazil (1995) is too
restrictive as it fails to take account of utterances such as (63) and (64) which in
conversation may represent increments whose initial NV elements are left
unsaid.
(^25) Example (67) was re-transcribed into discourse intonation conventions by
Cauldwell (1993).
Chapter 3
(^1) The term shared knowledge is being used informally, here, to refer to knowledge,
beliefs and assumptions speakers take for granted that they share with their
hearers. Technical defi nitions of the concept will be introduced and evaluated
in Section 2.
(^2) The discussion in Chapter 2 p. 27 showed that increments with subject verb inver-
sion which are not preceded or followed by a projected mental or reporting
clause do not appear to have the potential to tell.
(^3) The term truth employed here is not meant to suggest any objective or external
truth. Rather it means that if an individual is certain of a fact, that fact is true for
that individual. For example if an individual is 100% certain that ghosts exist
then the existence of ghosts is true for that particular individual. They can be
said to know that ghosts exist even though such knowledge is entirely factually
erroneous. In other words truth is always considered to be internal to a situation
e.g. Badiou (2001: 67–8).