The Issue Of What Counts As Semiosis And What Does Not

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 18-9):

SFL research on language development in young children has proven a useful starting point for work on paralanguage in two respects. On the one hand, the emergence of the first signs (protolanguage) highlights the issue of what counts as semiosis and what does not. On the other hand, the realisation of these first signs is multimodal – linguistic and paralinguistic resources are not differentiated at this stage. …

The influence of SFL research on the ontogenesis of language on our model of paralanguage is explored in detail in Chapter 2.

One basic challenge that has to be faced when working on paralanguage is how to distinguish it from behaviour – separating semiosis from non-semiosis in other words. …

From this point on we will use the term ‘somasis’ for non-semiotic behaviour (such as sneezing, stretching, scratching an itch and so on) and ‘semiosis’ for systems of signs.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the perspective taken is 'from above': how are these meanings expressed? The issue of what does or does not count as semiosis only arises from taking the opposite perspective 'from below': is or is not this an expression of meaning? That is, the authors have misunderstood SFL methodology, according to which, non-semiotic behaviour is irrelevant to a model of paralanguage.

See also the original comments on this at Misunderstanding The Difference Between Semiosis And Non-Semiosis.

[2] Here yet 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.

To be clear, it is Cléirigh's model of body language that derives from taking an ontogenetic (and phylogenetic) perspective:

• protolinguistic systems are those that develop before language (and persist thereafter);
• linguistic systems are those that develop as language;
• epilinguistic systems are those that develop after language.

The authors rebrand linguistic body language as sonovergent paralanguage, despite it being neither sonovergent nor paralanguage, which invalidates their rebranding of Cléirigh's model.

The authors rebrand epilinguistic body language as semovergent paralanguage, despite it not being restricted to paralanguage, and include within it protolinguistic body language that is used by species without language, and so is not epilinguistic, and reject the notion of protolinguistic body language, consigning the remainder to non-semiosis, as will be seen.