Table of contents 7
Acknowledgement 11
Introduction 13
Background 13
The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) 14
Collection of data for HKCSE 16
Composition of HKCSE (prosodic) 17
Speaker characteristics 19
Structure of the book 22
Discourse intonation systems 23
Introduction 23
Discourse intonation framework 23
Four systems of speaker intonational choices 26
Tone unit 27
Prominence, key and termination 28
Tone 33
Tone choice: proclaiming and referring 33
Tone choice: dominance and control 35
Orientation 37
Tone: questions and social elicitation 38
Declarative-mood questions 38
Yes-no questions 39
Information questions 41
Conclusion 42
Transcribing the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) 43
Introduction 43
Transcribing the HKCSE (prosodic) 43
Problems encountered in transcribing HKCSE (prosodic) 49
Conclusion 51
The iConc concordancing program 53
Introduction 53
The Corpus Menu 53
The intonation menu: Tone units 56
The intonation menu: Tones 60
The intonation menu: Key (ONLY) 60
The intonation menu: Termination (ONLY) 62
The intonation menu: Key + Termination 62
The intonation menu: Prominence 63
The concordance menu: Search 65
The concordance menu: Discourse Intonation System/Word Search 66
The Statistics Menu 68
The Statistics Menu: Unique Words 70
The Statistics Menu: Compare Unique Words Lists 71
Conclusion 72
Tone Units 73
Introduction 73
Distribution of size of tone units 73
Single word tone units 78
Speaker choices and tone unit boundaries 80
Tone unit boundaries and disambiguation 80
Alternative \u2018or\u2019 84
Approximative versus specific use of numerals 86
Tone unit boundaries and Linear Unit grammar 87
Tone unit boundaries, Linear Unit Grammar and back-channels 91
Tone unit boundaries and extended collocations 92
Conclusions 94
Prominence 97
Introduction 97
Distribution of prominences 97
Patterns in the selection of prominence 102
Prominence: the existential paradigm 102
Opposites 102
\u201cInevitability\u201d 1
Speakers\u2019 differing perspectives 105
Double-prominence on one word 106
Convergence 108
Vague use of numbers 114
Pre-modification of vague determiners 117
Lexical cohesion 119
Word associations 123
Pronoun prominence 125
Word class and frequency 128
Conclusions 134
Tones 137
Introduction 137
Distribution of tones across speakers and sub-corpora 138
Patterns of tone use 141
Proclaiming and referring tones 141
Level tone 143
Functions of the level tone 143
Context 1 144
Context 2 147
Frequencies of use of the level tone for Contexts 1 and 2 153
Disambiguation and tones 154
Question intonation 156
Declarative-mood questions 156
Question types and tone choice 160
Speaker dominance and control 161
Functions of the rise and rise-fall tones 163
Continuative use of the rise tone 163
Use of the rise tone to exert pressure on hearer to speak 164
Use of the rise tone to openly remind the hearer(s) of common ground 165
Change in the speaker\u2019s world view 166
Distribution of the rise and the rise-fall tones across discourse types 168
Conclusions 170
Key and termination 173
Introduction 173
Distribution of key and termination across the HKCSE (prosodic) 174
Patterns of usage 178
Contrastive use 179
Disagreements 181
Particularising use of high key 187
Topic development 188
Endings 190
Equative 191
Pitch concord and discord 193
Pitch discord 197
Frequency distribution of pitch concord and discord 199
Most frequent word classes in single word tone units 200
Conclusions 202
Conclusions and implications 205
Concluding comments 205
Implications for future research 207
Implications for learning and teaching 208
References 211
appendix 1 219
HKCSE-Related scholarly output to date 219
appendix 2 223
Quantitative data 223
Distribution of words 223
appendix 3 227
Quantitative data 227
Tone units 227
appendix 4 269
Quantitative data 269
Prominence 269
appendix 5 283
Quantitative data 283
Tones 283
appendix 6 303
Quantitative data 303
Key and termination 303
Author index 331
Subject index 333