Seriously Misunderstanding Cléirigh's Epilinguistic Body Language

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 11):

Gesture converging with meaning (semovergent paralanguage) 

Semovergent paralanguage is convergent with the lexicogrammar and discourse semantics of spoken language (its content plane). We adopt a discourse semantic perspective on these meaning making resources here (Martin and Rose 2007).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, 'semovergent paralanguage' is the authors' rebranding of their source Cléirigh's epilinguistic body language, originally exemplified as follows:

	semantics	kinetic expression
textual	eg reference: exophoric vs endophoric;  personal vs demonstrative	ø pointing hands, eyes, head exophoric ø pointing to phenomena and metaphenomena in the field of perception endophoric ø pointing to regions of (metaphenomenal) gesturing space as text
interpersonal	eg modality and polarity	ø eg oscillating hand (modalisation), nodding head (polarity)
ideational	phenomena: elemental (& configurational?)	ø eg drawing shapes, mimicking movements with hands

[2] This misrepresents the source model. Epilinguistic body language involves systems which, like pictorial systems, are made possible by the transition into language, but which are not systematically related to the lexicogrammar of language. That is, like pictorial systems, this type of body language differs from language in being bi-stratal, not tri-stratal.

It will later be seen that this fundamental misunderstanding by the authors eventually leads them to falsely conclude at the end of their paper that all paralanguage is actually language.

[3] Adopting a discourse semantic perspective on epilinguistic body language is a fundamental error, because, as demonstrated in great detail here, Martin's discourse semantic systems are largely misunderstood grammatical systems.

It will be seen in the posts that follow that little contact is made with these discourse semantic systems, in any case.  The purpose of this publication is merely to annex Cléirigh's ideas to Martin's collection of rebranded systems.

[4] There are serious theoretical problems with Martin & Rose (2007), as demonstrated in great detail here.