The Psychological Foundations of the Grammar 85
construct underpinning speaker’s lexical selections was shown to be their
appreciation of their own cognitive environments.
While support was located for Brazil’s view that falling tones are required
before an utterance can be said to tell his limitation of the grammar to
describing speech which contains only end-falling and end-rising tones
appears in need of revision. Instances of speakers selecting level tone in the
literature were cited and a category of oblique increment was proposed in
order to fully map out utterances where interlocutors have for one reason
or another temporarily shifted their attention away from satisfying their
communicative needs. In order to fully describe the workings of used lan-
guage it is important to codify oblique increments because such increments
form part of the verbal context. Instances where the speaker was forced
to select level tone because of processing diffi culties have not yet been
discussed. Tench (1997 and 2003) shows that the whole notion of used
language as speech accompanied solely by rising and falling tones requires
re-examination.