[Xmca-l] Re: Why Voicemail Intonation Sounds Weird

[HENRY SHONERD]

David,
Relevant to the discussion of gesture and displaced reference is joint shared reference (of an object that can be seen by both) in interactions between caregivers and children in the early development of language. The interaction appears to prefigure full-fledged displaced reference termporally and spatially. Interesting also is that the interaction is rhythmically entrained turn-taking. I don’t know if David McNeil discusses this interaction in his research.
Henry
 
> On Oct 30, 2018, at 10:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Andy:
> 
> Corballis isn't a linguist, but David McNeill, who taught psycholinguistics when I was at University of Chicago, is. He has a rather idiosyncratic reading of Vygotsky: instead of a ZPD,  he argues for a "Growth Point" ("growth" rather than development) which includes both word and gesture, which then co-evolve. He uses this to make the argument you want to make: that tool and sign use co-evolve, and there is no genetic sequence of tool--sign or sign--tool, and he also argues that Vygotsky is wrong to imply that thinking is prior to speech in any way: they must co-evolve microgenetically just as they did sociogenetically. McNeill says that Thinking and Speech is wrong on two counts. First of all, it predicts that gesture will die away because speech can do everything gesture can and more; it doesn't. Secondly, it fails to predict the persistence of gesture in telephone communication, where it seems to have no function; nevertheless, it persists. 
> 
> About four years ago, I supervised an MA in which we compared how children talk in Australia and in Korea with their hands free and with their hands clasped behind their back. It made a very big difference: hands free resulted in much more prosodic variation (at word level and at phrase level), hands clasped intonation was flatter. While we were analyzing the data, I noticed that there it also made a big difference in eye contact, and I remembered that Professor McNeill pointed out that people use hands to beat stresses when they talk on the phone, but not when they talk to a tape recorder. Maybe that's why voicemail intonation not only sounds weird, it feels weird.
> 
> Halliday says that interpersonal meaning is largely prosodic--that is, it's spread out over a whole sentence (unlike ideational meaning, which is nouns and verbs and adjectives), it is linearized through meter and through stress and not through componentiality (as ideational meaning is), and it realizes power differentials, like giving and getting information (you can say pretty much anything you like in English and still be polite if you have the right tone of voice, something that we linguists are always exploiting when we want to study taboo language, e.g. what you non-linguists have to refer to as the "N-word"). 
> 
> To me, all this hints at a real way of solving the coevolution problem, which as the other David K pointed out will never be solved through archaeological evidence: the study of child language. Children do seem to develop interpersonal meaning before they develop ideational meaning (Halliday called interpersonal meaning the "magic gateway" to ideational meaning).This to me points up the essential difference between tools and signs that McNeill's theory cannot explain: in tools, use value is primary and exchange value is derived from it, but in signs things are very much the other way around. 
> 
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
> 
> New in Early Years, co-authored with Fang Li:
> 
> When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and maths in the grandmother tongue 
> 
> Some free e-prints available at:
> 
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full <https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full>
> 
> 

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