Zappavigna & Martin's ‘Linguistic, ‘Epilinguistic, And Protolinguistic Body Language

 Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 22, 232-3):

Table 1.3 also provides us with a model for dealing with two dimensions of the relation between language and paralanguage, treated by Zappavigna and Martin (2018) as ‘linguistic body language’ and ‘epilinguistic body language’.²¹

²¹ Zappavigna and Martin’s (2018) dimension of protolinguistic body language has been subsumed in our current model as subtypes of somasis and interpersonal semovergent paralanguage. This avoids the problem of using the term ‘protolinguistic’ for a paralinguistic system making meaning alongside language (protolanguage, as initial emergent semiosis, by definition cannot accompany language), and it makes room for paralinguistic systems enabled by the discourse semantic system of APPRAISAL (see Chapter 2 for further discussion of this point).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here the authors misrepresent Cléirigh's model — protolinguistic, linguistic and epilinguistic body language — as the work of Zappavigna and Martin (2018). Plagiarism is defined as the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. Without Cléirigh's model of body language, the authors have no model, that is, nothing to rebrand as their model of paralanguage.

[2] This misunderstands Cléirigh's model. Protolinguistic body language cannot be subsumed as subtypes of somasis. On the one hand, protolinguistic body language is semiotic, whereas somasis is non-semiotic. On the other hand, protolinguistic body language does not require the ontogenesis of language, and is found in other socio-semiotic species, whereas epilinguistic body language ('semovergent paralanguage') does require the ontogenesis of language, and is not found in other socio-semiotic species.

[3] On the one hand, this is misleading because it is untrue. Protolanguage does accompany language, as exemplified by interjections in exclamations. Halliday (1994: 95):

Exclamations are the limiting case of an exchange; they are verbal gestures of the speaker addressed to no one in particular, although they may, of course, call for empathy on the part of the addressee. Some of them are in fact not language but protolanguage, such as Wow!, Yuck!, Aha! and Ouch!.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 425):

Interjections are certainly quite different from adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions; they tend to be protolinguistic remnants in adult languages.

On the other hand, it seriously misunderstands the model that the authors are plagiarising. On Cléirigh's model, protolinguistic, linguistic and epilinguistic systems accumulate in the lifetime of a human meaner, and the question then becomes 'How are the meanings of these different semiotic systems expressed in the gestures and postures of body language?'

[4] To be clear, there is no need to 'make room' for paralinguistic systems enabled by APPRAISAL, since these are, by definition, epilinguistic, and so 'semovergent' in the authors' terms. However, this raises the question of whether the paralinguistic systems that the authors identify are enabled by APPRAISAL, or are they to be found also in other protolinguistic species. And if found also in other protolinguistic species, it raises the question of whether the systems are, in Halliday's model of complexity, semiotic (symbolic value) or social (non-symbolic value), as in the exchange of value in eusocial insect colonies.