Misrepresenting Cléirigh's Work As The Authors' Work

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 8, 6):

Sonovergent paralanguage converges with the prosodic phonology of spoken language (Halliday 1967, 1970; Halliday and Greaves 2008; Smith and Greaves 2015). From an interpersonal perspective, it resonates with tone and involves a body part (e.g. eyebrows or arms) moving up and down in tune with pitch movement in a tone group (TONE and marked salience). From a textual perspective it involves a body part (e.g. hands, head) beating in sync with the periodicity of speech – which might involve beats aligned with a salient syllable of a foot, the tonic syllable of a tone group, or a gesture co-extensive with a tone group (i.e. in sync with TONALITY, TONICITY or RHYTHM). An outline of this sonovergent paralanguage is presented in Table 4.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously explained, 'sonovergent' paralanguage is the authors' rebranding of Cléirigh's 'linguistic' body language, justified on the basis that the invented word 'sonovergent' is more transparent.  As previously explained, linguistic body language, as the name implies, is "convergent" with language itself and differs from language only in its mode of expression — the opposite of the authors' claim.  As Cléirigh originally elaborated:

	lexicogrammar	prosodic expression
		phonology	kinetic
textual	LEXICAL SALIENCE	RHYTHM	gesture (hand, head) in sync with the speech rhythm
	FOCUS OF NEW INFORMATION	TONICITY	gesture (hand, head) in sync with the tonic placement
	INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION	TONALITY	gesture (hand, head) co-extensive with tone group
interpersonal	KEY	TONE	gesture (eyebrow*, hand) in tune with the tone choice

* also: rolling of the eyes for tone 5.

[2] This is misleading.  Here the authors elaborate the details of Cléirigh's model of linguistic body language — see [1] — as if it is their own development of it as sonovergent paralanguage.  Proof that the omission of attribution is not accidental is provided by the misleading claim (p3) identified earlier which primes the reader for the interpretation of this work as the author's innovation:

We will in fact suggest that SFL’s tone group, analysed for rhythm and tone, provides an essential unit of analysis for work on paralanguage as far as questions of synchronicity across modalities are concerned.