Ideational Semovergent Paralanguage Concurring With Ideation And Connexion

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 11):

Ideational paralanguage is ‘mimetic’, concurring with IDEATION and CONNEXION systems;

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is the authors' rebranding of the ideational dimension of Cléirigh's epilinguistic body language, a type that can be deployed with or without spoken language:

	semantics	kinetic expression
ideational	phenomena: elemental (& configurational?)	ø eg drawing shapes,  mimicking movements with hands

[2] To be clear, as Cléirigh originally observed:

When used in the absence of spoken language, this type of body language is called mime, and it is mimetic in this sense.

[3] The claim here is that the semogenesis of ideational paralanguage is similar to the semogenesis of Martin's discourse semantic systems of IDEATION and CONNEXION.  However, the problem here is that these systems are neither ideational or semantic.  These systems are Martin's rebrandings of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) lexicogrammatical systems of the textual metafunction: lexical cohesion (IDEATION) and cohesive conjunction (CONNEXION) — both of which, however, are  indeed confused with aspects of the ideational metafunction, as demonstrated here and here.  So the  proposed "concurrence" here is actually between textual grammar and ideational paralanguage.

In any case, as will be seen, the authors provide no examples of gestures realising CONNEXION features, although there is an instance of cohesive conjunction their data, which the authors misinterpret as an 'emblem'.

As will also be seen, the authors provide no examples of gestures realising features of three systems of IDEATION (Martin & Rose 2007: 76): taxonomic relations, nuclear relations or activity sequences.  Instead, the examples provided are all instances of gestures realising elemental or configurational phenomena (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999), in line with Cléirigh's original model.