A Review of A Grammar of Speech 45
Esser proposes a hierarchy of neighbouring tone units which contain
propositions of more or less importance signalled by tone and termination
selections. He only recognizes two tones; end-falling and end-rising, and
claims that falling tone presents the content as more important and rising
tone as less important (ibid. 60). However, he also argues that high termina-
tion signals that the content of a tone unit is more important than one with
mid termination which itself is more important than a tone unit with low
termination (ibid. 66). Combining the values represented by tone and ter-
mination, he argues for the following hierarchy of tone units:
// ↑\ .. // > // ↑/ .. // > // \ .. // > // / .. // > // ↓\ .. // > // ↓/ .. //^23The major differences between Esser’s system and Brazil’s grammar are
that he does not recognize a unit like the increment and this lack of recog-
nition makes it hard to use Esser’s hierarchical system of the presentation
of content to describe discourse. He claims that his hierarchy applies to
neighbouring tone units but does not defi ne the extent of the neighbour-
hood within which tone units reside. A unit such as the increment provides
boundaries for the neighbourhood. The second major difference is that
Esser does not discuss how the communicative value of key labels content.
To sum up this section, most scholars have not decoupled termination
from tone. The extra attitudinal implications realized by the non-neutral
variants of the tones were described and the extra values realized by ‘high’
and ‘low’ were paraphrased and found not to be incompatible with the
termination values posited by Brazil. Some evidence was presented that
speakers use pitch peaks on tonic syllables to prioritise their language.
2.3.4 High-key and high-termination in increments
Speakers may ask for adjudication in order to satisfy their own social or
informational needs, e.g. they may invite an evaluative high-key response to
complete a quasi-asking exchange (Brazil et al. 1980: 78). The following
examples from Brazil et al. (ibid. 77) illustrate:
(63) // p TIME to GO //
(64) // p TIME to ↑GO //Brazil et al. (1980) claim that in (63) mid termination anticipates a mid-key
response and so it realizes the local communicative value of telling that it is
time to go. The speaker signals an expectation that the hearer is expected to