In this chapter Wallace Chafe describes several states of consciousness and how they contribute to the way we produce spurts of speech, which he calls "intonation units." He compares consciousness to vision, which we can divide into two categories: foveal vision - the object of our focus, and peripheral vision - everything else in the scene, which we are aware of, but not necessarily concentrating on. Similarly, he proposes we have both focal and peripheral consciousness, and that our mind is in a constant state of change, as we shift from one focus to the next.

He identifies three states of information in the mind:

• Active - information that is the focus of your attention
• Semiactive - peripheral information that isn’t the current focus of attention
• Inactive - information stored in your unconscious mind

In his summary Chafe gives the following definition of intonation units:

"Intonation units are hypothesized to be the linguistic expression of information that is, at first, active in the consciousness of the speaker, and then, by the utterance of the intonation unit, in the consciousness of the listener, or at least that is the speaker’s intent."

A key part of our ability to understand intonation units is "the ability to shift one’s consciousness of sound from the semiactive to the active state during the first few seconds after it has ceased to be present in the air." This has been called echoic memory. He gives an example of our ability to retrieve something said to us while we were busy reading a newspaper. Our echoic memory allows us to process sound sequences as entire units; therefore, "the gray house" and "la maison grise" have the same meanings, even though the words are in a different order.

The features of spoken language that characterize its separation into intonation units may include the following:

• Changes in fundamental frequency (perceived as pitch)
• Changes in duration (perceived as the shortening or lengthening of syllables and words)
• Changes in intensity (perceived as loudness)
• Alternations of vocalization with silence (perceived as pausing)
• Changes in voice quality
• Changes of turn

Intonation units can be categorized into three main types:

• Fragmentary - truncated phrases that were never completed successfully (no determinate structure)
• Substantive - ideas of events, states, or referents (typically constrained to about four words)
• Regulatory - function to regulate interaction or information flow (typically one word long)

A good example of categorizing discourse into these three types is given on pp. 63-64. Substantive units contain most of the information conveyed, and are separated into event ideas, state ideas, and participants in the events or states. An event idea verbalizes an event of some kind - something that happens. A state idea simply exists for a certain period of time. State example: " Cause I had a … a thick patch of barley there," Both ideas are highly transient in active consciousness, constantly getting replaced by another idea, and are also nonrepeated, typically occurring only once within a particular discourse. The last kind, participants, or referents, tend to be more persistent in discourse. They are the ideas of people, objects, or abstractions - typically verbalized as nouns or pronouns. Events or states can persist by being converted into referents, or nominalized.