Confusing Content (Entity Types) With Expression (Gestures)

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 93, 94):

All of these linguistic entity types can be realised concurrently in paralanguage as gestures. Paralinguistic entities are often realised through a flat hand suggesting the boundaries of an object (e.g. parallel hands implying the sides of a box) or through a curved hand suggesting something being held or moulded (e.g. a cupped hand implying the weight or shape of an object). We introduced three entities from the ‘Visit to the Dermatologist’ phase in Chapter 1. In this phase the paralanguage concurred with two entities in the language (needle and bump) (Table 4.2).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here again the authors misunderstand paralanguage as an expression-only semiotic system that realises the content of an instance of language.

[2] To be clear, here the authors have misunderstood linguistic entities that are realised by paralinguistic body language as paralinguistic entities. That is, they have classified content in terms of how it is realised on the expression plane. This is analogous to classifying these discourse semantic units as phonological entities, since this is how they are realised on the expression plane of language.

It will be seen that this basic misunderstanding of stratification, which invalidates their model, leads the authors to present a semantic system network in which all the systems and features are of the expression plane (Figure 4.1).

[3] This is misleading because it is untrue. Neither of the first two hand shapes realises the entity 'needle'. The first mimes the manner of holding a needle, and the second mimes the dermatologist's manner of injecting with a needle. Similarly, the third hand shape does not realise the entity 'bump', but the 'bubbling up' of the granuloma after the injection of the steroid.

This, again, is recycled from Martin & Zappavigna (2019). Here are the comments from its review: Misinterpreting The Data.