The Argument That Paralanguage Is An Expression System Of Language

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 26-7, 28):

But what about the stem -language which para- is prefixed to? The drift of consensus in gesture studies, as reviewed and promoted by Fricke (Fricke 2013) appears to be towards treating aspects of what we have been calling paralanguage here as part of language (in fact as part of grammar in Fricke’s work). From the perspective of SFL this argues for a re-interpretation of the taxonomy in Fig. 44 above as Table 6 below, with paralanguage positioned not alongside language but as part of its expression form.

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[1] To be clear, consensus is not argument, and to present it as argument is the logical fallacy known as Argumentum ad populum.

[2] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL, Fricke (2013) provides no argument with regard to theorising in SFL, because she does not proceed from the same theoretical assumptions as SFL.  That is, Fricke operates with a different conception of grammar, and a different conception what constitutes inclusion in a grammar, as the following quote (op. cit.: 734) makes clear:

[3] To be clear, the claim that paralanguage is an alternative to phonology, graphology and the expression systems of Sign languages is easily falsified by the fact that the following clause can be realised by genuinely linguistic expression systems, but not by Martin's semovergent paralanguage:

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

To be clear, in SFL, to be part of language, a semiotic system has to be systematically related to the grammar (Halliday 1985/9: 30).  This is why Cléirigh's linguistic body language ("sonovergent paralanguage") is called linguistic — because its gestures realise the same grammatical features as prosodic phonology, differing only in the parts of the body used to express them.

Epilinguistic body language ("semovergent paralanguage"), on the other hand, is not systematically related to the grammar, and like all semiotic systems other than language, is bi-stratal, not tri-stratal, which is why, unlike genuinely linguistic expression systems, it cannot realise the Einstein quote above.

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It is instructive to consider the overall argument of this paper:

• Firstly, Cléirigh's types of body language were rebranded as types of Martin's paralanguage, and then misunderstood and misapplied.
• Second, gestures realising numbers (claimed to be examples Kendon's emblems) were claimed to be expressions of language, not paralanguage.
• Finally, all paralanguage was claimed to be expressions of language (because people using other theories agree that it is).

To be clear, the reasons why the authors have interpreted their paralanguage as expressions of language are because

• linguistic body language ("sonovergent paralanguage") is language, and 
• the authors have confused intersemiotic relations ('convergence') with intrasemiotic stratification (realisation) and 
• have set out with the narrow intention to relate the expressions of epilinguistic body language ("semovergent paralanguage") to Martin's discourse semantic systems (his rebrandings of Halliday's speech function and cohesion).