Anomalous tone-units

However comprehensive one's descriptive framework may be (and the one given in this course is very limited), there will inevitably be cases which do not fit within it. For example, other tones such as fall rise-fall or rise-fall-rise are occasionally found. In the head, we sometimes find cases where the stressed syllables are not all high or all low, as in the following example:

.After ,one of the 'worst 'days of my vlife

It can also happen that a speaker is interrupted and leaves a tone-unit incomplete - for example, lacking a tonic syllable. To return to the analogy with grammar, in natural speech one often finds sentences which are grammatically anomalous or incomplete, but this does not deter the grammarian from describing "normal" sentence structure. Similarly, although there are inevitably problems and exceptions, we continue to treat the tone-unit as something that can be described, defined and recognized