The Tone Group As A Unit Of Analysis For Paralanguage

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 4):

We will in fact suggest that what SFL refers to as a tone group, analysed for rhythm and intonation, provides an essential unit of analysis for work on paralanguage as far as questions of synchronicity across modalities are concerned.

Blogger Comments:

Here the authors mislead by misrepresenting what Cléirigh's model of body language "suggests" as their own suggestion. In Cléirigh's model, 'linguistic' body language, is concerned with bodily movements in time with the rhythm of speech and in tune with the pitch movements of speech. This means that these gestures can potentially coincide with rhythmic and tonic prominences in tone groups. Whether protolinguistic and epilinguistic gestures are timed with tone groups, however, is another matter. This was shown not to be the case in the review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019).

The exact same wording as the above appears in Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 3). See Misrepresenting Cléirigh's Ideas As Their Own.