Problems With The Authors' Analysis Of The Resonance Of Affect And Force

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 156, 157):

In Coraline’s first encounter with Wybie, a boy of her own age from the same neighbourhood, he accuses her of being a water witch to which she responds: //3 ^ and if / I’m a / water / witch //1 ^ then / where’s the secret / well //. The focus in (30) is on the second tone group of this utterance, that is, //1 ^ then / where’s the secret / well //. … 

The first image in (30) captures Coraline forcefully stomping her right foot and punching down with her arms and clenched hands in an expression of PARALINGUISTIC AFFECT – [anger] with [strong] FORCE. The voice quality on where realises VOICE AFFECT as [anger] – through high intensity, tension and roughness (shown as the grey area in the spectrogram in (30)). Coraline’s face is not visible in the first image; but a prosody of FACIAL AFFECT [anger] is additionally realised more or less intensively in the remaining three images – as the eyebrows are drawn down and together. These expressions of PARALINGUISTIC FORCE in realisations of [anger] resonate with and amplify one another.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the depiction of body language on an animated clay puppet is not body language, but an epilinguistic construal of body language, because the representation of body language on an animated clay puppet requires the prior development of language in the animator; it is not something that a dog or cat, for example, could do.

In considering the body language that is thus epilinguistically depicted:

[1] As previously explained, the beating of the foot and arms realises textual salience, and is linguistic, like the beats of speech. Here the authors again misconstrue this textual salience as interpersonal force (and as epilinguistic instead of linguistic).

[2] As previously explained, the bodily expression of emotion is protolinguistic, and so pre-metafunctional, because it does not require the prior evolution and development of language, as demonstrated by Darwin's work on the expression of emotions in other animal species. Here, however, the authors misconstrue the expression of emotion as requiring the prior evolution and development of language (epilinguistic) and locate it within the interpersonal metafunction, regardless of whether or not it is used to evaluate.

[3] To be clear, as the above demonstrates, the "resonance" here is between the protolinguistic expression of emotion (which other animals can do) and the linguistic expression of salience (which other animals cannot do).