Confusing Semantic Entities With The Gestures That Realise Them

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 96-7):

Paralinguistic entities may also vary in terms of SIZE relative to the amount of gestural space taken up by the prosodic unfolding of gestures in a stretch of discourse. In other words they may be, for instance, bigger or smaller than other entities that have occurred up to a given point in the speaker’s discourse. For example, the ‘heaping bowl of Chex Mix’ gesture in (3) is large relative to the ‘applesauce squeeze’ gesture in (1) that it precedes.

Blogger Comments:

As previously explained, terms such as 'paralinguistic entity' confuse discourse semantics (entity) with paralanguage misunderstood as an expression-only semiotic system (size, gestural space, gestures, bigger, smaller). To be clear, the gestures are the expressions that realise the semantic entities; they are not the entities — just as the phonemes that realise semantic entities are not the entities.