Discourse Approach to Turn-taking

2.3

Description of Intonation by David Brazil

David Brazil’s approach to intonation is based on the belief that ‘the communicative

value of intonation is related to the purpose that a particular piece of language is

serving in some ongoing, interactive event’ (Brazil 1995a: 240). The key concepts of

his intonation system are the context of interaction, including the present state of

convergence or divergence of an ongoing speech event, and the role-relationship

between the speaker and the listener. He identifies four meaningful choices in the

intonation system: ‘tone unit’, ‘prominent syllables’, ‘tone’, and ‘key/termination’.

The relationship between the four elements is that prominence fixes the domain of the

three variables of tone and key or termination, all of which contribute to the

communicative value of the tone unit (Brazil 1997). Intonation represents the

existential context that projects the role-relationship and the state of convergence

between the speaker and the listener.