Foreshadowing Misunderstandings In Chapter 4

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 91, 21):

Chapter 1 provided a brief overview of the ways in which paralanguage can converge semovergently with spoken language in terms of ideational meaning. The reader is reminded that we are not envisaging a one-to-one mapping of these discourse semantic systems to paralinguistic systems but are instead interested in degrees of concurrence between these systems (see Table 1.3).

Chapter 1 described how, in terms of articulation, ideational paralanguage is mimetic – meaning that it resembles a material thing or action (i.e. ‘draws’ a material reality). This chapter provides further details on the ways in which Figures and Elements are supported by paralanguage, and presents system networks modelling this meaning potential.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously demonstrated, the "convergence" and "mapping" here is the realisation relation between the content of language and the expression of body language used paralinguistically. Again, this demonstrates the authors' misunderstanding paralanguage as an expression-only semiotic system.

[2] To be clear, 'concurrence', 'resonance' and 'synchronicity' are three terms for the one idea, 'convergence', and this idea is a misunderstanding of the realisation relation between the language content and paralanguage expression, deriving from authors' misunderstanding paralanguage as an expression-only semiotic system. By 'degrees of concurrence', then, the authors mean the degree to which the content of language is realised in paralinguistic expression.

[3] Cf. Cléirigh's original notes (2009) on epilinguistic body language (body epilanguage):

These are body language systems which, like pictorial systems, are made possible by the transition into language, but which are not systematically related to the lexicogrammar of language.  When used in the absence of spoken language, this type of body language is called mime, and it is mimetic in this sense.

The kinological systems are analogous to the articulatory systems of phonology, though they realise meaning rather than wording, and include gestures that involve drawing in the air — ‘where drawing and gesturing merge’ (Matthiessen 2007: 8).

[4] To be clear, 'support' here means realisation. In this chapter, the authors plan to describe how the figures and elements in the semantics of language are realised in their expression-only system of paralanguage. This will lead them to present, as Figure 4.1,  a semantic system network, paralinguistic entity, in which all the systems and features are of the expression plane.