Theme in spoken language: when a tone group is not a clause

Abstract While there is a clear tendency for a Theme not occur within its own tone group it is equally clear that clauses are frequently formed out of more than a single tone group. Hence it is precipitous to assume an a priori relationship between clause and tone group/information unit. Speakers in pursuit of their individual communicative choices manage their interactional and informational needs by producing prosodic and thematic choices appropriate to their goals. Such choices as we have seen are frequently mutually re-enforcing, but speakers may employ prosodic choices which foreground their interactional needs. Specifically, this entails that there is no direct relationship between lexico-grammatical and prosodic meanings; both redound with semantic meanings. Yet, these meanings may be constrained by the interactional demands of the communicative situation in which a speaker operates. In this paper, I examine the spoken realisation of Interpersonal Theme and find that Interpersonal Themes realized by Mood adjuncts and metaphors of modality tended to be realized with different key. Similarly, the expectation that marked Theme was likely to attract high key was found to be subject to the speaker’s need to manage the interaction.