THE DISTRIBUTION AND
FOCUS OF INFORMATION
THE INFORMATION UNIT
Speakers divide their messages into chunks called information units. In the spoken language these are not represented directly by any one type of grammatical unit, although there are certain correlations. Rather, they are signaled prosodically, by means of the intonation system of the language. Information units are therefore defined in terms of the spoken language and how speakers organize it. Readers of a written text, however, interpret what they read by mentally assigning information units to the text, helped by punctuation and the grammar.
The prosodic unit that represents a unit of spoken information is the tone unit. A tone unit consists potentially of a series of stressed and unstressed syllables, and always contains one syllable, the tonic, which is singled out by tonic prominence. That is, it carries the main pitch movement (for instance, falling, rising, falling and then rising, rising and then falling), a jump, up or down, in pitch and possibly extra stress and added duration. Its function is to mark the focus of information. Or rather, it signals the nucleus or highest point of the unit which is informationally in focus, as in the example below (the capitals represent the tonic syllable):
He’s arriving on THURSday.
This utterance would be likely to have a jump in pitch up to THURS and a pitch fall on ‘day’. In this example, the tone unit coincides with a clause. But speakers can choose to make tone units longer 1 or shorter 2 than a clause, depending on how much of the information they want to make prominent. (The symbol // indicates the end of a tone unit.) Short answers, questions and commands can consist of a single prominent syllable, such as YES! WHY? or DON’T! If a speaker wishes to make the message highly informative and emphatic, each lexical word may be treated as an information unit, with as many tonics as there are words, as in 2 (where the tonic syllable in immediately is ME):
1 I think it’s a great pity she didn’t GET the job //
2 COME // HERE // IMMEDiately //
Speakers shorten or lengthen tone units in response to their communicative needs. This response is emotive rather than deliberate, and is therefore less likely to be controlled than, for instance, the choice of a lexical item. Variation in the length of tone units also depends on several factors, some cultural, others personal. According to one cognitive view, the intonation unit or tone group represents the limited amount of information that our consciousness can focus on at any one time. This has led to the ‘one chunk per clause principle’ or ‘one new idea constraint’, in conversation at least. For spoken English a short independent clause with few content words represents the typical information unit.
Other grammatical units which may correspond to tone groups include various kinds of adjunct, especially when initial (in the late nineteen thirties, better still, unfortunately); a dependent clause (although it wasn’t your fault); a main clause with an embedded clause (I thought we were leaving), coordinated predicates with the same Subject (he’s seen the pictures and likes them) and possibly NG Subjects (all the lonely people). The following are examples of utterances consisting of two tone units:
// in the late nineteen THIRties // he went to HOLLywood //
// better STILL // send an E-mail //
The following transcription from Crystal and Davy illustrates how one speaker organizes an episode into tone units of varying length, with overlapping units (in brackets) by speaker B. The dots and dashes (. -) represent progressively longer pauses. The speakers have been talking about football grounds in Britain, many of them quite old.
The prosodic features indicated are as follows:
// tone unit boundary
| first prominent syllable of the tone unit (‘onset’)
↑ the next syllable is stressed and also steps up in pitch
Capitals are used to indicate the nucleus.
Of course // the CONTINENTALS I suppose // they came in LATE // and they . build them – (B: PROPERLY //) you know// this MILAN ground // . there’s a famous one THERE . ÍSN’T there? // . (B: erm) you know// they were saying how SUPERB they were // . But the one in SPAIN // was the BEST // – (B: of course //) I thought it was in MADRID // – was it Real MADRID// they were fan (b: they’re all erm . . . ) oh they were FANTASTIC // it showed the PHOTOGRAPHS of them // . people sitting there in the hot SUN // you know // smoking CIGARS// and it showed the crowds . EMPTYING // – (B: they had a practice – erm) EXIT //// (B: YEAH //) and about . thirty seconds LATER // or a minute later they were CLEAR //
