44 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
unexpected appears more in need of adjudication than the predictable or
routine. The communicative signifi cance of the factor ‘low’ is harder to
paraphrase as its communicative signifi cance varies with different pre-heads
according to Halliday. Tench (1996: 129–30) shows that low and high
pre-tonics play a part in the expression of attitudinal meaning. The low
pre-tonic conveys what O’Connor and Arnold (1973) label ‘a disapproving
or sceptical pattern’ while the high pre-tonic ‘lacks a suggestion of disap-
proval’. Tench’s label of ‘non-committal’ appears to capture the attitudinal
value expressed by the factor ‘low’. Speakers who wish to project a non-
committal attitude appear neither to invite adjudication nor expect concur-
rence of their utterance. Halliday and Tench ascribe a different value to the
factor ‘low’ in utterance-fi nal fall-rises. Halliday labels them as signalling
‘a strong reservation’ while Tench suggests the label ‘strongly contrastive/
implicational’ But, if the meaning of an utterance-fi nal fall-rise is to signal
a speaker reservation or implication, the reservation or implication is only
strengthened by coupling it with low termination: the speaker signals the
reservation and simultaneously attempts to label the reservation as not
being open for discussion.
Esser (1988) follows Brazil and decouples key and termination from
tone. He employs the term ‘key’ to describe the pitch height of prominent
syllables: his transcriptions notate both ‘nuclear key’ (in Discourse Intona-
tion terms termination) and ‘non-nuclear’ key. He notates termination
with a capital H for high, a capital L for low, and like Brazil (1997) he does
not mark mid termination with any special diacritic. Key is notated with
a lowercase h representing high, and a lowercase l representing low. Like
mid termination, mid key is not notated.^21 The criteria Esser employs
to decide the pitch level of a prominent syllable are not entirely clear.
However, he states that he ‘like Brazil et al. (1980) distinguishes three “keys”
[terminations] mid, high and low’ (1988: 3) and so it appears that he
employs similar criteria to Brazil et al. (1980).
Esser (1988: 67–80) argues that termination contributes to the presentation
of the information structure of a text. High termination indicates that the
tone unit it is contained in carries the most important information and
the high termination itself falls within a word which is a presentation peak; a
word which the speaker projects as being the most important.^22 Intuitively it
appears that speakers are likely to invite adjudication of what they consider
the most important information in their utterance. Low termination functions
as a strong means of subordination. Tone units with low termination contain
information of less importance than tone units with non-low termination
while simultaneously signalling the end of a paragraph (ibid. 80).