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

[Andy Blunden]

Thanks David. Your second paragraph gives the answer to your
first paragraph (re gesturing on the phone).

While palaeontology is largely a kind of secular theology,
nevertheless, I do look forward to palaeonology finding an
answer to when speech arose (just as we now know what the
Sun is made of, not just what it looks like). And surely you
are not claiming that ontology repeats phylogeny, are you David?

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 31/10/2018 3:56 PM, David Kellogg 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
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20181031/53890c28/attachment.html