Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 194):
In spoken English, prominence is composed through the TONALITY, TONICITY and RHYTHM systems of prosodic phonology. It is also composed in multiple layers of predictive prominence in discourse, from clause-level Theme to hyper-Theme to layer upon layer of macro-Theme, and in layers of aggregating prominence from clause-level New to hyper-New and so on.
In the face-to-face discourse of live lectures we have noted the potential for expressions of prominence at multiple layers in discourse to synchronise aurally with prosodic phonology and visually with PARALINGUISTIC PERIODICITY. Such intermodal convergences amplify the prominence of the meanings involved.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, in spoken English, the phonological resources for assigning prominence are TONICITY and RHYTHM. TONALITY is the system for selecting the distribution of tone groups.
[2] To be clear, the grammatical resources for assigning prominence are "clause-level" Theme and "information unit-level" New. As previously demonstrated, the authors' avoidance of the information unit allowed them to make an unwarranted connection between grammatical Theme and discourse semantic hyper-Theme and macro-Theme.
As previously pointed out, Martin's 'hyper-Theme', 'macro-Theme' and 'hyper-New' are rebrandings of terms from writing pedagogy: 'topic sentence', 'introductory paragraph' and 'paragraph summary' respectively.
[3] This is misleading because it is untrue. All the authors have done is describe the movement of a lecturer around his lecturing space and correlated his position in space with what he was saying at the time. They provided no evidence that the position assigns prominence, or that it realises the correlated discourse semantic category, such that the position identifies the meaning or the meaning identifies the position.
Significantly, the authors produced no system networks to theorise their system of PARALINGUISTIC PERIODICITY, their system of meaning named after a structure type.
