Semovergent Paralanguage And CONNEXION

 Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 33):

As noted earlier, ideationally semovergent paralanguage, as formulated in Chapter 4, does not involve resources for explicitly connecting gestures in terms of addition, comparison, temporality or causality and so does not converge with CONNEXION in spoken language.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This confuses levels of abstraction. To be clear, it is not a matter of connecting gestures, but a matter of gestures (expression) realising logico-semantic relations between figures (content). 

[2] To be clear, any gesture that realises relators such as 'and', 'or', before', 'after' etc. serves this function, such as pointing left, right, forward, behind while saying the temporal relator.

A more interesting case is the logico-semantic relation that Martin's CONNEXION does not account for: projection. A speaker can mark a projection by imitating the indexical features of the Sayer of the projecting figure. Halliday (1989: 30-1):

Indexical features, by contrast [with paralinguistic features], are not part of the language at all, but simple properties of the individual speaker. It may help to tabulate these (see Table 3.1).

So, for example, a satirist who imitates the indexical features of say, Donald Trump, is indicating that his projection is to be understood as a projection of Donald Trump.