Problems With The Authors' Analysis Of Paralinguistic Force

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

In (23), Coraline is arguing with her mother about why she has locked a tiny door. Convergent with dreams aren’t dangerous, her left hand depicts the proposition (dreams aren’t dangerous) as a semiotic entity (see Chapter 4) at the same time as her left arm is extended out front of her body. The expression realises PARALINGUISTIC FORCE as [quantify:size:extent]. In this instance FORCE is expressed in the embodied paralanguage but not in convergent spoken language.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is a bare assertion since it is unsupported by argument: the ipse dixit fallacy. Moreover, it is demonstrably false. In terms of practicability, the reader is invited to use one hand to represent dreams aren’t dangerous as an entity. In terms of theory, if this were possible, it would be an instance of grammatical metaphor — a figure realised as an element (Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 250) — in a semiotic system without a grammar: a contradiction in terms.

[2] To be clear, the claim here is that the extending of an arm to represent the extent of an entity is an instance of GRADUATION, the scaling of an interpersonal APPRAISAL (Martin & White 2005: 135). This is demonstrably false. Firstly, the representation of the extent of an entity is an ideational construal, not an interpersonal appraisal. Secondly, the only entity here is dreams, and this mental 'process thing' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 244) is clearly not represented by the hand, and the extent of the arm does not represent the extent (duration) of dreams. Thirdly, the evaluation here is made through the quality dangerous, so any upscaling of the evaluation must be an upscaling of dangerous not of dreams, and this the extending of the arm does not represent.

Moreover, this image contradicts the authors' model of PARALINGUISTIC ENGAGEMENT, because here a supine hand is used to represent the [monogloss] of dreams aren’t dangerous, whereas on the authors' model a supine hand represents not only [heterogloss], but [heterogloss: expansion], which is 'allowing space for other voices' (p143).