ACTIVIDADES EN HORARIO LECTIVO

In addition to tonality and tonicity realisations of the marked Theme, key, the pitch height of the onset, which is the first prominent syllable (Brazil, 1997; O’Grady, 2010) within the tone unit13, is the other prosodic aspect to be examined in the current study to reveal how it contributes to structuring the map task. The intention behind considering key of the marked Theme is: 1) O’Grady’s (2017a) argument that in the spoken text, the function of Theme as an unfolding device which grounds a message in its local context and orients

13 _{Brazil (1997) used the term ‘tone unit’ instead of tone group. In the current study, the term ‘tone group’}

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it towards the rest of the discourse (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) can by revealed by examining the prosodic realisations of Theme including key; 2) O’Grady’s (2017a) argument that key functions like Theme in that it orients the clause to the rest of the discourse through its role in signalling expectations. With relation to the map task dialogues, the aim is to uncover how key choice of the marked Theme contributes to grounding the message in its local context and orients it to the rest of the map task interaction and contributes to structuring it and whether there is an interplay between marked Theme and its key choice. The current section presents theoretical background on key to clarify what key is, reveals its communicative significance in English discourse and further clarifies the importance of examining it in the present study. The section focuses on Brazil’s key system as it is followed in the present study. It also presents other works on key to situate Brazil’s views and the current study in the wider literature and to clarify the reason behind following Brazil’s views in the study. The presentation of other work on key will also show how Brazil’s argument on key is extended and reveal the differences found between Brazil and other scholars in the way of approaching key with relation to the way of identifying key and the number of key choices and their communicative value.

Brazil’s key system (Brazil, 1997; O’Grady, 2010) is an aspect of his Discourse Intonation theory which examines the communicative significance of the intonation choices made by speakers in naturally occurring speech from a contextual perspective (i.e. language in use). Brazil argued that intonation choices that the speakers make depend on the speakers’ contextually referenced perceptions (Hewings and Caudwell, Foreword to Brazil, 1997: iv). Brazil (ibid: 71) argued that speech is interactive; speakers shape their messages on the basis of their assumption of the state of ‘speaker- hearer convergence’ depending on the state of convergence which they assume exists between them and the audience. In case of the intonational selection, it signals speakers’ projected assumptions of the state of the speaker/ hearer convergence. Each of the intonational selection has a general meaning which takes on a local meaning within a particular context (ibid: xi). Brazil’s local meaning of intonation is similar to Halliday’s subjective view of presentation of information (accenting or deaccenting it) regardless of whether or not the information has already been mentioned in the context of interaction.

Brazil took the term ‘key’ from Sweet (1890) who was the first to suggest it. However, Sweet used key to refer to the general pitch of the sentence or sentence group: “each

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sentence or sentence group has a general key or pitch of its own which can be classed as high, mid or low” (cited in Henderson, 1971: 178) whereas for Brazil (1997), key is grounded in the tone group.

Like Sweet, Brazil (ibid) distinguished three key choices: high, mid and low. The pitch height of a tone group is determined in terms of the onset, the first prominent syllable within the prior tone unit. So, the onset of a given tone group may be pitched higher, lower or around the same pitch level as the onset syllable of the previous tone group. Example 3.5 below illustrates how key is identified in terms of the key of the prior tone group. The numbers denote the hertz value of the pitch height and M refers to the mid key selection; the example is taken from the dialogue of group one of the map task and the full data script of the dialogue is presented in Appendix K. Example 3.5 and other examples in this section are written in intonation coding. The intonation coding symbols are illustrated on p. xi.

Example 3.5

|| M 179 \OK|| is there M 209 ANYthing between the old mine and the \MOUNtains||

In the example, the hertz value difference between the onset syllable of the first tone group ‘ok’ and that of the second tone group ‘is there anything between the old mine and

the mountains’ realised on ‘any’ in ‘anything’ is not large as the numbers show. So the

two onset syllables are in the same pitch height range. Therefore, key choice on ‘any’ is mid as the onset in the prior tone group, ‘ok’. The way key is identified is further described in 6.2, p. 119. In the example also, the second tone group ‘is there anything between the

old mine and the mountains’ has more than one prominent syllable and Brazil (ibid) called

it ‘extended tone unit’ because the onset syllable and the tonic syllable are not conflated, the syllable ‘any’ in ‘anything’ is the onset syllable whereas the syllable ‘moun’ in ‘mountains’ is the tonic syllable, that carries the tone which is the main pitch movement in the tone group. Brazil (ibid) referred to the pitch level on the tonic syllable as termination and he recognised three levels of termination high, mid and low. Key refers to the change in pitch height on the onset. In the first tone group of Example 3.5, the onset syllable and the tonic syllables are conflated because tone unit contains only one prominent syllable ‘ok’. Brazil (ibid) called such tone unit a ‘minimal tone unit’ and the pitch level of the minimal tone unit is identified depending on the pitch level on the

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conflated onset/tonic syllable. So, Brazil did not conflate key, the pitch height on the onset with termination, the pitch height on the tonic syllable.

Brazil’s (1997: 245) interest in the changes in pitch level lies in his intention to “take note of the way they affect the communicative value” as the three key choices denote different meaning. Brazil (ibid) showed that the selection of key projects the speaker’s assumption about the hearer’s expectations as the talk unfolds. O’Grady (2017a) mentions that key can say something about the status of the starting points of the tone group because it projects speaker’s expectations about the hearer’s responses (i.e. anticipating what the hearer’s answer will be). High key signals that the information contained within the following tone group is contrary to expectations (i.e. has a denial of expectation relation to what has preceded). The ‘contrasting’ here refers to a selection which “projects a binary opposition upon the existential paradigm and explicitly denies an alternative” (Brazil, 1997: 45). Mid key indicates that the tone group adds to the expectations created by the previous discourse; it neither signals contrast nor equivalence to the expectations created by the previous discourse. Mid key projects that the proposition contained within the tone group is projected by the speaker as not being contrary to the hearer’s expectations and the discourse is developed in an expected and unsurprising manner. Low key signals that the content within the following tone group is equivalent to the expectations created by the previous discourse (ibid: 75- 84). In the map task interaction, key choice of the marked Theme is examined to find out how it helps manage the interlocutors’ expectations and aids them in the interaction about the route and contributes to structuring the map task.

The below table summarises the meanings of the three key choices:

Table 3.2 the communicative value of key from Brazil (1997) summarized by O’Grady (2010: 28)

Key Meaning

High Tone unit is contrastive with expectations created by previous discourse

Mid

Tone unit adds to the expectations created by previous discourse: it is neither contrastive with nor equivalent to the expectations created by the previous discourse

Low Tone unit is equivalent to the expectations created b previous discourse

Brazil (ibid) proposed that mid key is the unmarked choice whereas high key is a marked choice as it projects additional meaning of contrast. Chun (2002: 34) describes mid key

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choice “as generally unmarked”. She argues that the selection of the high or low key involves raising or lowering the pitch of the whole tone unit relative to a pitch that can be established as the norm for the speaker concerned. In other words, the use of the high or low key is a divergence from what is usual. Similarly, O’Grady (2010: 29) also shows that high and low selections add more to the meaning as “they represent a more delicate selection”. In the context of the map task, it will be interesting to see how the divergence from the mid key will aid the map task interlocutors in their description of the route in terms of the information that is added by the divergence from the mid key. More light will be shed on the markedness of the key selection when discussing the frequency of occurrence of the key choices in the map task dialogue.

Example 3.6

||ok so for H 270 ME || that’s M 229 KIND of by the stone giant||

Example 3.7

|| M 118 SO || we’re at the M 89 START || M 83 UM|| and M 95 beLOW the start is the

old mine||

Example 3.8

||so now you M 115 SHOULD be in the bottom left corner|| L 62YEAH ||

The high and low key choices in Examples 3.6 and 3.8 respectively add more to the meaning as “they represent a more delicate selection” (O’Grady, ibid: 29). With the high key realized on the onset of the first tone group of Example 3.6, labels ‘for me’ and ‘stone

giant’ which is the alternative landmark found on the current speaker’s map, as being

contrary to the previously generated expectations; the current speaker signals that the current location of the route on her map will be by a landmark that is different from what is found on the previous speaker’s map. While the low key in the second tone group of Example 3.8 labels the information as being equivalent to the previously generated expectations; the speaker is expecting that the current route location on the hearer’s map is the same as on his map and low key on his second tone group projects this. As for Example 3.7, mid key in the second tone group adds to the expectations created by

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previous discourse; it is neither contrastive with nor equivalent to the expectations created by the previous discourse.

The communicative value of Brazil’s key choices and their frequency of use have been examined by Cheng, Greaves and Warren (2008) in their study ‘Hong Kong Corpus of spoken English (HKCES) (prosodic)’ that includes almost one million words collected from four spoken communication domains: academic, business, social (conversation) and public with participants from two different cultural groups: the Hong Kong Chinese (HKC) and native English Speakers (NES) come from Britain, United States of America and Australia. The frequency analysis of the key choice used by the NES across the sub- corpora and participant groups shows that mid key is by far the most frequent selection, followed by high and low key. As for the contribution that key makes to the communicative value of an utterance, Cheng et al.’s (ibid) findings on the mid and low key choices were found to be in line with Brazil’s views; low key signals equative value to what is said in the sense of as expected in that what is said is self- evident and so a foregone conclusion (Brazil, 1997: 49-53). As for high key meaning, Cheng et al. (2008) find that high key is used to denote: contrast (what is being said is perceived to be in some way unexpected) and particularising (it is not used to contrast propositions but rather to “reject all the existentially possible alternatives”) (Brazil, 1997: 45). High key was found indicating disagreement in that “what the current speaker is saying contrasts with what the previous speaker has said, or that it goes against expectations given what the previous speaker has said” (Cheng et al. 2008: 170); the speakers were found having different views. Similar results on the use of high key as a strategy to denote disagreement in the spoken discourse were arrived at also by Cheng and Warren (2005), who used the business sub- corpus of the (HKCSE). In the map task context, that is a form of spoken discourse, it is likely that high key will be used to signal contrast or counter expectations with relation to the location of the unshared landmarks, the locations of the landmarks are unpredicted.