[Xmca-l] Why Voicemail Intonation Sounds Weird

[David Kellogg]

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
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