The Contradictions Of 'Different Degrees Of Concurrence'

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

Each phase involves figures and entities that have different degrees of concurrence between language and paralanguage: some are realised only in language, some co-realised in language and paralanguage and some are realised only in paralanguage (see the discussion of mime in Chapter 7). We begin by exploring how entities are multimodally realised in the vlog and then move on to consider figures.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, by 'concurrence' the authors mean the realisation of the ideational meaning of language in the expression-only system of paralinguistic body language.

[2] To be clear, if ideational meaning is only realised in the expression system of language, there is no concurrence and no paralanguage.

[3] To be clear, if meanings are realised only in body language, then the meanings are not those of the text as an instance of language, so there is no concurrence, since the meanings of the text are not realised in the expression-only system of paralinguistic body language. That is, here the authors incongruously propose a realisation relation between the content potential of language and an expression instance of paralinguistic body language.

[4] To be clear, the discussion of mime in Chapter 7 is recycled from Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 22-6) and discusses the miming of protolinguistic body language. See the comments from the review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019): Mime As Paralanguage.