Reference Endophoric To Body Language [2]

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 171-2, 166):

The selection [virtual:location] is also realised paralinguistically through an unresolved vector. The more delicate choice [home] is realised by identifying a space occupied by the speaker; and the opposing choice [away] is realised by pointing to a space other than the space occupied by the speaker (Figure 6.2). 

Paralinguistic expressions of [home] and [away] can converge with the identification of both time and space in verbal discourse. The feature [home] can accordingly converge with both ‘here’ and ‘now’. As noted by Calbris (2011: 128), past time may be pointed to as a location behind a speaker. Where the past is expressed in language in relation to the future, synchronous paralinguistic deixis typically points to a space to the left of the speaker then to the right.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, to claim that a pointing gesture that identifies a location in space is an "unresolved" vector is self-contradiction, since the vector is "resolved" by the location that it points to. So, in such instances, the deixis is not virtual.

[2] As previously explained, Figure 6.2 is not a system of DEIXIS, but a classification of referents in the environment of body language. Some of the referents are distinguished in terms of deixis (self vs other, 'home' vs 'away'), but most are not (actual vs virtual, semiosis vs location, retrospective vs prospective). Moreover, the network presents referents as realised by the gestures that point to them (cf. referent 'dog' realised by reference item 'this'), and in four cases, referents are realised by the insertion (+) of a pointing gesture into some unacknowledged structure. And in one case, the feature 'virtual', the referent is realised by the structural insertion of a gesture that does not point to it (+ unresolved vector).

[3] To be clear, this is another example of using body language to make endophoric reference. In the previous example, material elements of outer experience (mouth, temple) ideationally construe semiotic elements of inner experience (word, encode), and the pointing gesture signals that those meanings are recoverable from those construals by body language. In this example, the left-right dimension of interpersonal space ideationally construes the past-future dimension of interpersonal time (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 144, 332), and the pointing gesture signals that those meanings are recoverable from those construals by body language. Again, the vector is "resolved" and so the "deixis" is not virtual.