Semovergence Implies Sonovergence

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

As we will illustrate in the chapters which follow, it is probably safe to claim that whenever semovergent paralanguage is deployed, it will be coordinated with tonality, tonicity and rhythm; this is equivalent to arguing that semovergence implies sonovergence. Sonovergent paralanguage on the other hand can be deployed without semovergence, through gestures in tune with or in sync with prosodic phonology (but no more).

Blogger Comments:

Apart from the initial clause, this is recycled verbatim from Martin & Zappavigna (2019). Here are the comments from the review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019): The Notion That Semovergence Implies Sonovergence.

[1] To be clear, the authors have provided no evidence in support of this bare assertion, as the posts on semovergent paralanguage on this blog demonstrate.  This is merely a reassertion of their earlier claim (p3):

We will in fact suggest that SFL’s tone group, analysed for rhythm and tone, provides an essential unit of analysis for work on paralanguage as far as questions of synchronicity across modalities are concerned.

[2] As previously explained, "sonovergent" paralanguage (Cléirigh's linguistic body language) is the direct opposite of "sonovergent" because the expression plane is where it differs from language.  The reason Cléirigh called it linguistic body language is because it realises the same content as prosodic phonology.