Emblems

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 41-2):

We conclude with a comment on what Kendon (2004) refers to as emblems, drawing on Ekman and Friesen (1969). Included here are gestures such as thumbs-up or thumbs-down (as praise or censure, respectively), index finger touching lips (for ‘quiet please’), hand cupped over ear (for ‘I can’t hear’), middle finger vertical (for ‘get fucked’) and so on. Our vlogger uses one of these gestures to introduce the first of her explanations as to why her hair is darker than usual – raising her index finger as an emblem for the numeral ‘1’.

Blogger Comments:

This is recycled almost verbatim from Martin & Zappavigna (2019). Here are the comments from the review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019): Emblems.

To be clear, in terms of SFL theory, the word one here functions like firstly, as a conjunctive Adjunct, realising a textually cohesive temporal conjunctive relation internal to the discourse.  On this basis, the index finger gesture, on Cléirigh's original model, is an instance of textual epilinguistic body language, an expression realising the same meaning as the word.

On Martin's (1992) model, cohesive conjunction is misunderstood as a logical discourse semantic system, now rebranded as CONNEXION.  On this basis, the authors here missed an opportunity to present an instance of logical semovergent paralanguage.  (It will later be seen that the authors regard emblems — what Kendon glosses as 'quotable gestures' — as expressions of language, rather than stratified paralanguage).