Saturday 9 February 2019

Ideational Semovergent Paralanguage

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 11, 12):
Representation (ideational semovergent paralanguage) 
From an ideational perspective we need to take into account how spoken language combines entities, occurrences, qualities and spatiotemporal circumscriptions as figures (IDEATION), and how these figures are connected to one another (CONNEXION).
Semovergent paralanguage supports these resources with hand shapes, which potentially concur with entities, and hand/arm motion, which potentially concurs with occurrences; the hand/arm motion is optionally directed, potentially concurring with spatiotemporal direction (to/from there in space, to/from then in time). We say “potentially concurring” because ideational paralanguage can be used on its own, without accompany spoken language; see the discussion of mime in section "Multidimensionality (multiplying meaning)" below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, 'semovergent paralanguage' is the authors' rebranding of Cléirigh's epilinguistic body language.

[2] As previously explained, and argued here, Martin's ideational discourse semantic systems of IDEATION and CONNEXION are neither ideational nor semantic, since they are misunderstood rebrandings of Halliday & Hasan's (1976) lexical cohesion and cohesive conjunction, which are lexicogrammatical systems of the textual metafunction.

[3] To be clear, this is a matter of language, regardless of whether it is spoken, written or signed.

[4] To be clear, in the discourse semantic system of IDEATION (Martin 1992: 314-9; Martin & Rose 2007: 96), 'entity' refers only to a subtype of Range.

[5] To be clear, in the discourse semantic system of IDEATION (Martin 1992: 314-9; Martin & Rose 2007: 90ff), these are termed 'processes', not 'occurrences'.

[6] This is presumably a typo for 'spatiotemporal circumstances', merely one of nine general types of circumstance.

[7] This is very misleading.  To be clear, 'figure' is a type of phenomenon in the (genuinely) ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 48).  It does not feature in the discourse semantic system of IDEATION in Martin (1992).  Martin & Rose (2007: 74) introduce the term 'figure' without acknowledging their source and without integrating it into their model of IDEATION.  Moreover, because Martin's IDEATION is a rebranded misunderstanding of lexical cohesion, it cannot be integrated into their model in a theoretically consistent way.

[8] The word 'support' here is potentially misleading, since epilinguistic body language makes meaning in its own right.

[9] Here the authors propose 1-to-1 relationships between the expression of body language and the content of language — instead of the content of body language.  This confusion leads the authors to the false conclusion at the end of the paper that body language is just another expression mode of language itself.

Even so, the validity of proposed 1-to-1 relationships will be examined in upcoming posts.

[10] Here the authors mislead the reader by presenting a claim of Cléirigh's epilinguistic body language as if it is their own.

[11] See the upcoming critique of the authors' discussion of 'mime'.

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