ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the stretches of intonation contours formed by the nucleus and the tail. It describes the corpus on which the investigation was based and characterise it by means of a few general statistics. The corpus consists of four instalments of British television serials, together comprising some 14,000 words. Three of these, or 11,550 words, are instalments of the serial 'George and Mildred'. The motivation for choosing quasi-spontaneous rather than real spontaneous speech as the basis of their analysis is partly that the latter frequently contains 'mushy' material like false starts, repetitions and vocalisations of various sorts, towards which their analysis was not directed. The material was transcribed orthographically, with nuclear tones and tone group boundaries indicated. A discussion of tails cannot be undertaken without some clarification of the theoretical status of the nucleus. It is assumed that the location of the nucleus is the major surface realisation of two binary variables, focus and mode.
