Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 34, 233):
Paralanguage deploys facial expression and bodily stance to share attitude. In (75) our vlogger nuances her appreciation (exciting) of a neighbourhood get-together she has dressed up for with raised eyebrows and a lopsided-mouth expression³¹ (which we might read as indicating that some followers might not find it all that exciting).
³¹ The ‘out-of-kilter’ mouth here can be interpreted as soft focus, converging with kind of.
Blogger Comments:
This is recycled verbatim from Martin & Zappavigna (2019). Here are the comments from the review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019): Nuancing Appreciation By (Not) Looking Surprised.
[1] Rewording this in terms of SFL theory:
In (semovergent) paralanguage, the meanings of ATTITUDE can be realised by facial expression and bodily stance.
That is, it isn't paralanguage that deploys, and the speaker enacts her attitude.
[2] The authors, after having just declared that, in terms of ATTITUDE, 'paralanguage can only enact emotion' (i.e. AFFECT and not APPRECIATION or JUDGEMENT), here present an example that, by their own terms, "resonates" with APPRECIATION. They use term 'nuance' here to disguise the invalid claim that body language 'surprise' resonates with 'exciting'. Moreover, as the reader can see, the facial expression does not realise the emotion 'surprise'. Here the authors are misrepresenting the data to fit their own model.
[3] On Cléirigh's original model, the eyebrow raising here is an instance of linguistic body language (sonovergent paralanguage), not epilinguistic body language (semovergent body language). This would be obvious if the authors had included the tone choice of the accompanying tone group, which they wrongly analyse for tonicity. The speaker places the tonic on that's, marking it as the focus of New information, and uses tone 3 (level pitch):
//3 ^ so / that's / kind of ex/citing //
The tone group, which immediately follows an edit, begins at a high pitch and stays at that level throughout. The eyebrows do the same, and so function the same interpersonally as the tone choice; see [4].
[4] To be clear, the "lopsided mouth" is, in this instance, merely a feature of the speaker's anatomy.
The meaning that the authors attribute to the speaker's anatomy is actually the meaning realised by her eyebrow position and tone choice. As Halliday (1994: 305) points out, tone 3 with declarative mood can realise the KEY feature 'unimportant'. So here the speaker's interpersonal paralanguage does not "resonate" with the positive APPRECIATION realised in wording; in fact, it contradicts it — what psychologists call 'involuntary self-disclosure'.
[5] Leaving aside the fact that the authors have attributed the meaning realised by the speaker's eyebrow position to a permanent feature of the speaker's anatomy, the authors here provide no basis whatsoever for interpreting an 'out of kilter' mouth as realising the GRADUATION feature 'soft focus'. It is merely a bare assertion, unsupported by reasoned argument or evidence of any kind. Readers familiar with the field of multimodality will not be surprised by this, of course.
[3] On Cléirigh's original model, the eyebrow raising here is an instance of linguistic body language (sonovergent paralanguage), not epilinguistic body language (semovergent body language). This would be obvious if the authors had included the tone choice of the accompanying tone group, which they wrongly analyse for tonicity. The speaker places the tonic on that's, marking it as the focus of New information, and uses tone 3 (level pitch):
//3 ^ so / that's / kind of ex/citing //
The tone group, which immediately follows an edit, begins at a high pitch and stays at that level throughout. The eyebrows do the same, and so function the same interpersonally as the tone choice; see [4].
[4] To be clear, the "lopsided mouth" is, in this instance, merely a feature of the speaker's anatomy.
The meaning that the authors attribute to the speaker's anatomy is actually the meaning realised by her eyebrow position and tone choice. As Halliday (1994: 305) points out, tone 3 with declarative mood can realise the KEY feature 'unimportant'. So here the speaker's interpersonal paralanguage does not "resonate" with the positive APPRECIATION realised in wording; in fact, it contradicts it — what psychologists call 'involuntary self-disclosure'.
[5] Leaving aside the fact that the authors have attributed the meaning realised by the speaker's eyebrow position to a permanent feature of the speaker's anatomy, the authors here provide no basis whatsoever for interpreting an 'out of kilter' mouth as realising the GRADUATION feature 'soft focus'. It is merely a bare assertion, unsupported by reasoned argument or evidence of any kind. Readers familiar with the field of multimodality will not be surprised by this, of course.
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