The most striking example of intensification in the hair colour episode occurs when the vlogger uses whole body movement to enact her reaction to how dark her hair is. She throws her head back and leans back as her arms move rise up – literally overwhelmed with emotion (Fig. 28).
Blogger Comment:
[1] To be clear, it is not that the whole body expresses the same meaning in this instance, but that the authors have not analysed the different meanings being made by the various gestures and postures, including the shift of gaze.
[2] To be clear, the intensification in this instance is of the Quality dark, which is ideational in function, and quite distinct from the speaker's hatred of the Quality, which is construed by the following clause. That is, the intensification is a feature of the assessed, not of the assessing (e.g. I really hate it). This is demonstrated by the fact that the arm gesture beats on the tonic so, the intensifier of dark.
In terms of Cléirigh's original model, the beating of the gesture on the tonic is linguistic body language ("sonovergent" paralanguage), highlighting so as the focus of contrastively New information, whereas any aspects of the body language expressing conscious states are instantiations of paralinguistic body language. That is, contrary to the authors' claim, no aspects of this instance of body language can be identified as epilinguistic ("semovergent").
[3] The claim that this gestural configuration expresses 'being overwhelmed by the emotion of hate' — literally or figuratively — requires considerable justification, none of which is given.
[4] To be clear, Figure 28 displays an (incomplete and) incorrect phonological analysis — the tonic actually falls on so, not dark, the initial foot is omitted, and the pronoun I begins the following tone group (after a silent Ictus):
//1+ and it's / so dark //
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