Ignoring Content And Getting The Phonology Wrong

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 8, 7):

The phonological system of TONE is realised through pitch movement. In example (1) the vlogger’s eyebrows move up in tune with the rising tone (tone 2) on the syllable prev (Fig. 5).

 

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this presents Cléirigh's linguistic body language as the authors' sonovergent paralanguage, though in doing so, the authors only present the expression plane of the system, ignoring the content being realised.

Since this is linguistic body language, the interpersonal meaning that the pitch and eyebrow movement both realise depends on the grammar, the choice of MOOD, which in this instance is declarative:

//4 but /^ I could / not / find the /hair dye that I //2 bought / previously when I //3 dyed my / hair which I //3 loved I //3 loved the/ first time

On Halliday's model, the combination of tone 2 with declarative mood realises a protesting or contradicting statement (Halliday 1994: 305), as in

//2 that / can't be / true // ('so don't try and tell me!')
//2 ^ it / didn't / hurt you ('so don't make a fuss') 

In the authors' data, however, the speaker is not making a protesting or contradicting statement, and so this casts doubt on the phonological analysis. Listening to the data reveals that the pitch movement on the tonic is fairly level, tone 3.

The basic meaning of ('low-rising') tone 3, on the other hand, is that the information being realised is dependent on something else (op. cit.: 303).  In this monologic instance, it could be take to mean 'hold on, there's more to come'.  (In dialogue, tone 3 can function as a as a turn-keeping device: 'I'm not finished yet, so don't interrupt!'.) On this basis, the instance in question is better analysed as an emphatic variant of tone 3, just like the three tones that follow (and also the  preceding "tone 4").

Two trivial errors can be noted:

• the tonic syllable is pre, not prev, and
• a 'rise-fall' eyebrow movement corresponds to tone 5, not tone 2.