Mistaking Ideational Intensification For Interpersonal Intensification (Graduation)

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 17, 18):

Turning to GRADUATION, as noted by Hood (2011) the size of hand shapes and the range of hand/arm motion can be used to support graded language. In the following example the sweeping extent of the hand/arm motion resonates with the large quantity of hair dye in stock (whole stack) (Fig. 27).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here the authors confuse the general notion of intensification with a specific type of intensification: the graduation of attitude.  In this instance of language, there is no graduation of attitude because there is no attitude being expressed.  This is because attitude is a system of interpersonal assessment  and here no interpersonal assessment is being made.  That is, the extending post-Deictic whole does not assess the Thing stack by reference to positive or negative values of emotion, ethics or æsthetics, for example.

On the other hand, the speaker's positive evaluation of the re-stocking of her favourite hair dye is instantiated protolinguistically, with the emotion expressed through facial expressions.

[2] Here again the word 'support' demonstrates that the authors are concerned with matching body language expressions with language content, instead of body language content — a confusion which leads them to falsely conclude (p28) that paralanguage is a system of the expression plane only, which realises the content of language, alongside phonology and graphology.

[3] To be clear, this iconic gesture is epilinguistic ("semovergent"), but it realises ideational meaning, a Quality of the stack, not an interpersonal assessment.  So, in the authors' terms, it "concurs" with the "verbiage", rather than "resonating" with it.

[4] Trivially, the authors mislead by gradually increasing the size of screenshots to misrepresent the degree of intensification.