32 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
the losing were in the circumstances existentially equivalent. The extra informa-
tion generated by the concomitant low-key selection in (48) may realize
unnecessary but harmless implications of equivalence which are again
presumably overridden by the interlocutors’ apprehension of the state
of shared speaker/hearer understanding. Brazil (ibid. 64) points out, how-
ever, that examples (50) and (51) are not necessarily hyponymous: (51)
presents the two actions of washing and putting a record on as sequential;
(50) as existentially equivalent. The extra information realized by a con-
comitant joint key/termination selection must as Brazil explains have
‘some kind of justifi cation in the context of the interaction’. This suggests
that speakers in pursuit of their individual communicative purposes who
wish to present their actions as sequential while signalling the end of a
pitch sequence should produce example (52) rather than (50).
(52) // he WASHED // and PUT a ↓RECord on //To conclude, it seems that in some but not all instances of minimal tonic
segments harmless but contrastive implications or implications of equival-
ence may be overridden by the context. This section has briefl y described
the systems of key and termination and also highlighted two points worthy
of further exploration: namely the relationship between pitch sequence
closures and increment endings, and whether in minimal tonic segments
key and termination always realize independent signifi cant communicative
values.
2.3.1 Key and termination in increments
While Brazil did not discuss the communicative value of key and termination
in increments some of his examples suggest that he believed key and ter-
mination selections realize communicative values which attach to stretches of
speech other than tone units and pitch sequences. Examples (53) and (54)
from Brazil (1997: 55) demonstrate:
(53) // i COULDn’t go // ↑COULD i //
(54) // i ↑COULDn’t go // COULD i //He claims:
In (89) [here (53)] the assertion I couldn’t go has mid key and thus
meshes with a prevalent belief – perhaps made explicit earlier in the