Key and Termination – Increments 189
extensive subchain. This resulted in the low termination inadvertently
being selected in increment medial position.
There were 13 other examples of increment medial low termination in
the corpus which were immediately followed by the conjunction and which
either signalled an extension as in (38) or other circumstantial elements
e.g. (39)
(39).... what we hold ↓DEAR in this \↓COUNtry // and in other
CIVilized \NAtions throughout the world // [T2-Rf-20]
As in (38) it appears that Rf, while reading the unpunctuated text, inad-
vertently chose to place a low termination at a potential increment ending.
Realizing that the achievement of target state required the production of
further circumstantial elements she continued her increment until target
state had been reached. In other words, Rf may have tried to end her incre-
ment twice!
The remaining 16 low terminations which coincided with potential but
not actual increment endings are similar. The readers’ selection of low ter-
mination projected a context showing that they inadvertently believed that
their increments had achieved target state. It was only after they had pro-
duced the low termination that they realized the necessity of continuing
the increment. Example (40) illustrates:
(40) // i ↑DONT –THINK // –ERM // \ACtually // that it is
ANything to \DO with // a LOSS of aMERican \↓INfl uence //
at /ALL // [T2-Emi-1]
Emi produces the low termination, realizes that she has not achieved target
state and reopens the increment by producing the adverbial which results
in the achievement of target state. Thus, it seems that some of the lack of
correspondence between low terminations and increment endings may be
an artefact arising out of the reading procedure. If we exclude the low
terminations which coincided with potential increment endings from the
category of low terminations which do not correspond with increment
boundaries there are only 14, or 7 per cent of, low terminations which do
not coincide with increment endings.
Examination of these 13 instances showed that while the communicative
function of the low termination is hard to make sense of, the low termina-
tions, with one exception, were attached to lexical items which delimitated
the end of series of elements which functioned as theme; reduplicative