Paralanguage Converging With Sound: Sonovergent Paralanguage

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 23, 233):

Sonovergent paralanguage converges with the prosodic phonology of spoken language (Halliday, 1967, 1970a; Halliday and Greaves, 2008; Smith and Greaves, 2015). From an interpersonal perspective, it resonates with tone and involves a body part (e.g. eyebrows or arms) moving up and down in tune with pitch movement in a tone group (TONE and marked salience). From a textual perspective, it involves a body part²³ (e.g. hands, head) moving in sync with the periodicity of speech – which might involve beats aligned with a salient syllable of a foot (which might also be the tonic syllable of a tone group) or a gesture coextensive with a tone group (i.e. in sync with TONALITY, TONICITY or RHYTHM systems). An outline of this sonovergent paralanguage is presented in Table 1.5. …

²³ For wavelengths longer than a tone group, whole body motion is involved.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, "sonovergent paralanguage" realises the same lexicogrammatical distinctions as prosodic phonology, which is why Cléirigh termed it linguistic body language, and why it is invalid to model it as paralanguage.

[2] To be clear, this is Cléirigh's description of linguistic body language, misrepresented as the work of the authors — i. e. plagiarism — as demonstrated from the following extract from Cléirigh's notes:

Linguistic Body Language (Body Language)

This is body language that only occurs during speech.  Its kinology involves visible body movements that are in sync with the rhythm or in tune with the (defining) pitch movement of spoken language.  In doing so, the function of such movements is precisely that of the prosodic phonology: rhythm and intonation.

As linguistic, ‘prosodic’ body language is thus:

v  tri-stratal: its kinology realises the lexicogrammar of (adult) language, and

v  metafunctional (textual and interpersonal) in terms of Halliday’s modes of meaning.

 

	lexicogrammar	prosodic expression
		phonology	kinetic
	lexical salience°	rhythm	gesture (hand, head) in sync with the speech rhythm
textual	focus of new information	tonicity	gesture (hand, head) in sync with the tonic placement
	information distribution	tonality	gesture (hand, head) co-extensive with tone group
interpersonal	key	tone	gesture (eyebrow*, hand) in tune with the tone choice

* also: rolling of the eyes for tone 5.

°Halliday (1985: 60):

The function of rhythm in discourse is to highlight content words (lexical items). 

[3] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence: the logical fallacy known as ipse dixit. 

∞

See also the comments on the same text in Martin & Zappavigna (2019) at Misrepresenting Cléirigh's Work As The Authors' Work.