In this article we show how speakers manage information flow in real time and signal their interactional expectations. Speech unfolds temporally, not only as a series of lexical items which are grouped into grammatical units, but also as a sequence of tone groups which have the potential to achieve an act of telling by moving from an Initial State to a Target State. While, there is a general belief that speakers commence their discourse with information that is shared prior to telling information that updates the common ground, our speech functional analysis of a corpus of monologue and dialogue shows that matters are not so simple. Speakers may complete increments with lexical elements which aim to manage the spoken interaction or they may use non-congruent prosodic cues to manage their interaction or to upgrade or downgrade the salience of information within the increment and thus breach the expected given before new order. Our paper is of significance in that it incorporates prosody into a detailed description of how speakers manage information flow in real time and secondly it shows how in extended monologues speakers simultaneously manage informational flow and signal their interactional expectations. In other words, turns are no longer privileged as the sole sites where speakers balance informational and interactional needs; instead such needs are balanced moment by moment within and between increments which are themselves shaped by the interlocutors' shifting apprehensions of communicative purpose and the extent of presumed shared information.
