The Psychological Foundations of the Grammar 67
‘speakers characteristically pursu[ing] their purposes with respect to a second
party’. They shape their message depending on the state of convergence
which they assume exists between them and the audience (Brazil 1997: 71).
Theories which rest on the mutuality of knowledge/belief and the ability of
individuals to peer inside others’ minds are problematic for the reasons
outlined earlier in the chapter. Speakers rely, instead, on the state of their
own cognitive environments to judge the assumed state of convergence
between them and their audiences.
Brazil’s view of language is quite different from that labelled by Grosz and
Sidner (1990: 421) as the master-slave assumption. They criticize what, they
claim, is the prevalent view among scholars which is that the speaker (the
master) produces utterances and the hearer (the slave) attempts to infer
the meaning. They, like Brazil, argue that both the speaker and the hearer
are jointly involved in the construction of the discourse regardless of the
balance of their actual verbal contributions (ibid. 427). Accordingly, in this
book the terms speaker and hearer refer to discourse participants who are
temporarily occupying the role of either speaker or hearer, but whose role
in the discourse is to be both speaker and hearer.
The following paragraphs compare and contrast Brazil’s theory that tone
selection signals speakers’ projected assumptions of the state of speaker/
hearer convergence with two theories, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990),
and Gussenhoven (1983 and 2004), which examine the relationship
between tone choice and the projection of speaker’s expectations in dis-
course. These theories have been chosen for two reasons: the authors
come from a different tradition than Brazil and they have been widely cited
in the literature.
3.4.1 Intonation and the signalling of speaker expectancies in discourse
An extremely infl uential paper which attempts to link tone to how speakers
label their utterances is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) – hereinafter
P&H. They segment speech into intonational phrases (IP) which in turn
contain one or more intermediate phrases. A well formed intermediate phrase
contains one or more pitch accents plus a high or low tone known as
the phrase accent which marks the end of the intermediate phrase. P&H’s
taxonomy allows for six pitch accents: high tone (H) and low tone (L) and
four other pitch accents formed from a combination of H and L tones all
of which mark the lexical items they are associated with as prominent.
Pitch accents are notated by a star *. The end of the IP is marked with an
additional H or L tone known as the boundary tone which falls exactly at the