Intermodal Convergence

 Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 20-1):

In their work on intermodal relations in children’s picture books (Painter and Martin, 2012; Painter et al., 2013), Painter and her colleagues suggest a model involving degrees of convergence between verbiage and image. The model is organised by metafunction – degrees of concurrence for ideational meaning, degrees of resonance for interpersonal meaning and degrees of synchronicity for textual meaning (for illustrative text analysis, see Martin 2008; Painter and Martin, 2012). The relevant terminology is presented in Table 1.3. 

Painter and her colleagues’ main concern in proposing this model was to focus on the way in which the meaning potential of written language and images was taken up in picture books – with language and image sometimes doing comparable work, and other times with language making meaning the images did not, or vice versa. … 

For Painter and her colleagues studying the complementary contribution of language and images in picture books means looking closely at the choices instantiated in a bimodal text in relation to those that could have been manifested and carefully considering the commitment of meaning by one modality or the other. This is the perspective we adopt in this monograph as far as the contribution of language and paralanguage to spoken discourse is concerned.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the notion of intermodal convergence is the simplistic idea that the instantiations in different semiotic modes of the one text can be described as 'same' or 'different'. The different terms for different metafunctions all express this one very simple idea.

[2] To be clear, in this monograph, the authors will take the perspective of categorising the instantiations of language and paralanguage as same ('convergent') or different.

It will be seen that the body language the authors rebrand as 'sonovergent paralanguage' actually diverges from the phonology and converges with the lexicogrammar that prosodic phonology realises: primarily the systems of KEY (interpersonal) and INFORMATION (textual). Moreover, in realising the grammar, sonovergent paralanguage is language, not paralanguage (Halliday 1989: 30), which is why the authors' intellectual source, Cléirigh, termed this use of postures and gestures linguistic. Again, this self-contradiction invalidates the authors' rebranding of Cléirigh's model.

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See also the comments on Martin & Zappavigna (2019) The Notion Of Intermodal Convergence.