A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

118 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse

5.2 Transcribing the Corpus

As ultimately it is people who are the intended recipients of linguistic
messages and it is human hearers who must attempt to try to tease out
intended speaker meaning, it was decided to initially transcribe the
readings of Texts 1 and 2 using only auditory means. This was done as

–3 –2 –1 0 1 2

Bc

Bs

Dc

Dmc

Emi

Gc

Jt

Mh

Rf

Sn

Tr

Readers

Standard Scores

Figure 5.1 Variation in extent of tone units

–2 –1 0 1 2