The tail

It often happens that some syllables follow the tonic syllable. Any syllables between the tonic syllable and the end of the tone-unit are called the tail. In the following exam ples, each tone-unit consists of an initial tonic syllable and a tail:

look at it                    /what did you say                 oth of them were here

When it is necessary to mark stress in a tail, we will use a special symbol, a raised dot • for reasons that will be explained later. The above examples should, then, be transcribed as follows:

look at it              /what did you -say          oth of them were -here

This completes the list of tone-unit components. If we use brackets to indicate optional components (i.e. components which may be present or may be absent), we can summarize tone-unit structure as follows:

(pre-head)               (head)          tonic syllable (tail)

or, more briefly, as:

(PH) (H) TS (T)

To illustrate this more fully, let us consider the following passage, which is transcribed from a recording of spontaneous speech (the speaker is describing a picture). When we analyze longer stretches of speech, it is necessary to mark the places where tone-unit boundaries occur - that is, where one tone-unit ends and another begins, or where a tone- unit ends and is followed by a pause, or where a tone-unit begins following a pause. It was mentioned above that tone-units are sometimes separated by silent pauses and sometimes not; pause-type boundaries can be marked by double vertical lines (II) and non-pause boundaries with a single vertical line (I). In practice it is not usually important to mark pauses at the beginning and end of a passage, though this is done here for completeness. The boundaries within a passage are much more important.

|| and then 'nearer to the vfront || on the /left | theres a 'bit of forest | 'coming

'down to the waterside || and then a 'bit of a /bay ||

We can mark their structure as follows (using dotted lines to show divisions between tone- unit components, though this is only done for this particular example):

The above passage contains five tone-units. Notice that in the third tone-unit, since it is the syllable rather than the word that carries the tone, it is necessary to divide the word 'forest' into two parts, 'for-' fɒr and ' est' ɪst; in the fourth tone-unit the word 'waterside' is divided into 'wa-' wɔ: (the tonic syllable) and '-terside' təsaɪd (tail). This example shows clearly how the units of phonological analysis can sometimes be seen to differ from those of grammatical analysis.