Misunderstanding Textual Language As Interpersonal Paralanguage

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 146):

Embodied paralanguage can adjust the FORCE of verbally expressed meanings through options of [intensify] and [quantify]. The feature [intensify] can be realised in a number of ways: through increased muscle tension in a hand-beat; in a very rapid frequency of such beats (syncing with syllable-timed rhythm in the prosodic phonology of English – see Chapter 6); or in the holding of the completed position of a beat for an extended time.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As Halliday (1967) pointed out, the prosodic phonology of English is foot-timed, not syllable-timed (e.g. Italian).

[2] To be clear, the beating of the hands with the rhythm of speech is the use of the hands to realise the same content as those realised by the rhythm of speech. That is, the function of the hand-beats is linguistic, to realise textual salience, which is why such gestures are classified as linguistic in Cléirigh's model. So here the authors have misunderstood the textual salience as interpersonal force. Put in their own terms, the authors have misunderstood textual sonovergent paralanguage as interpersonal semovergent paralanguage.