Meaning Beyond The Clause And Sonovergent Paralanguage

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 11):

The second major advantage of stratifying the content plane has to do with meaning beyond the clause. This allows SFL to move beyond a lexicogrammatical conception of text as a bag of clauses and set up systems and structures dealing with cohesive relations of indefinite extent (Martin, 2015b). These discourse semantic systems will be introduced in Section 2.2. They are crucial to our work on paralanguage since in our model it is these systems rather than lexicogrammatical ones that converge with paralanguage in spoken discourse.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is seriously misleading, especially to the intended readership of this section: those unfamiliar with SFL Theory. Firstly, "text as a bag of clauses" is not a "lexicogrammatical conception" of SFL Theory; it is merely Martin's longstanding misunderstanding. In SFL Theory, text is a semantic unit, and semantics is realised by — not composed of — lexicogrammar, both by its systems that are realised by structures, and systems of the textual metafunction that are realised by cohesive relations. Moreover, cohesive relations, in themselves, do not warrant the stratification of the content plane. As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 237) point out:

Of course, what we are recognising here as two distinct constructions, the semantic and the grammatical, never had or could have had any existence the one prior to the other; they are our analytic representation of the overall semioticising of experience — how experience is construed into meaning. If the congruent form had been the only form of construal, we would probably not have needed to think of semantics and grammar as two separate strata: they would be merely two facets of the content plane, interpreted on the one hand as function and on the other as form.

Secondly, the discourse semantic systems that Martin (1992) set up to deal with cohesive relations are merely the systems in Cohesion In English (Halliday & Hasan 1976) rebranded as Martin's systems of IDENTIFICATION (cohesive reference and ellipsis), CONJUNCTION, now CONNEXION (cohesive conjunction) and IDEATION (lexical cohesion).

[2] Here again, the authors remind the reader that Cléirigh's model of body language is their model of paralanguage. The plagiarism in this work is effected through myriad small steps.

[3] To be clear, this flatly contradicts the authors' definition of sonovergent paralanguage as 'phonologically convergent' (p22). Moreover, sonovergent paralanguage is neither sonovergent nor paralanguage. Sonovergent paralanguage is the authors' rebranding of Cléirigh's linguistic body language, in which gestures serve the same function as prosodic phonology. That is, sonovergent paralanguage is language, not paralanguage, and it is divergent from phonology and convergent with the lexicogrammar that prosodic phonology realises.

To be absolutely clear, one of the authors' two types of paralanguage is not paralanguage — because it is language. This alone invalidates the authors' model of paralanguage.