Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 208-9):
In order to explore this question we need to first ask why paralanguage came to be regarded as in some sense ‘outside’ language proper in the first place – a position which has been challenged by specialists such as Fricke (2013), who argue for a more unified approach to gesture and speech. To understand this we probably have to appreciate the privileged position of the phoneme in influential linguistic paradigms such as the American structuralism documented in Joos (1957). This work founds a phonemics, morphology and syntax approach to language description which continues to shape introductions to linguistics, at least in the English-speaking world and its compliant intellectual dominions. The approach is fundamentally a combinatorial one, with clauses (ultimately) composed of morphemes and morphemes composed of phonemes – all of which is presented as linguistic form, arbitrarily related to meaning. Since paralinguistic signs are not composed of phonemes (or arguably of comparable entities) and do make meaning, paralanguage gets positioned as something to be studied alongside language, not as part of it.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL, Fricke (2013) provides no argument with regard to theorising in SFL, because she does not proceed from the same theoretical assumptions as SFL. That is, Fricke operates with a different conception of grammar, and a different conception what constitutes inclusion in a grammar, as the following quote (op. cit.: 734) makes clear:
[2] In contrast, Halliday (1989: 30) offers an explanation in terms of SFL Theory:
[3] To be clear, for Halliday (1989: 31), paralanguage is not part of the grammar, but is part of the linguistic system:
No comments:
Post a Comment