Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):
In spoken language, voice quality and facial paralanguage are key carriers of spirit. A relatively high-pitched, loud voice with a smile will tend to indicate warmth, no matter what is being said, while a relatively low and soft voice with a narrow range of pitch and a frown will tend to indicate warning (or negative spirit in general) (Ariztimuño, Drefyus, & Moore, 2022; Ngo et al., 2022). In written language these voice quality features are often replaced by other paralinguistic features, including emoji as shown above. Punctuation is also a key resource in this regard, though this seems to vary by generation. For a millennial such as the first author for example, the following three text messages from a parent have very different spirit.
(64) Ok!
(65) Ok
(66) Ok.
The first is said, as it were, with a smile – the exclamation mark indicating a warm, happy response. The second, without any punctuation, is relatively neutral. The third with a full stop indicates something is wrong – whatever was said previously means they are now in trouble (whether or not the parent intends this!).
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This passage enacts a subtle but telling confusion between modality of expression and mode of meaning. The authors collapse paralinguistic phenomena (voice quality, gesture, emoji) into a single continuum of “spirit,” as though all were functional equivalents distributed across channels. Yet this move erases the semiotic distinctness of each medium — and with it, the stratified architecture of meaning that Halliday’s model was built to protect.
First, the leap from voice quality and facial paralanguage in speech to emoji and punctuation in writing assumes a direct substitutive relation — as if emoji were “replacements” for prosody. But prosody and punctuation do not occupy homologous positions in the semiotic hierarchy. Prosody is a phonological realisation of interpersonal meaning within spoken language; punctuation is a graphological convention governing textual cohesion and rhythm in writing. Emoji, by contrast, are iconic adjuncts drawn from the visual modality — not linguistic realisations but co-deployed images that stand in relation to language rather than within it. To claim these three operate as equivalent carriers of “spirit” is therefore to conflate phonology, graphology, and imagery — three distinct semiotic systems.
Second, the authors’ casual notion that the “Ok!” / “Ok” / “Ok.” triad expresses different spirit values reveals a slippage from empirical description to idiolectal intuition. These differences are indeed conventionally interpretable in digital discourse, but their interpretation depends on sociolectal norms, not paralinguistic universals. To treat this as generational (“for a millennial such as the first author”) is to further mistake cultural patterning for linguistic encoding — an indexical effect is treated as a semantic system. This is precisely the kind of category error that occurs when contextual correlates of meaning are mislocated within language.
Finally, the authors invoke “negative spirit” as though it were a measurable interpersonal feature — but “spirit,” as they deploy it, is neither a system nor a stratum. It is an experiential metaphor for the affective ambience of a message, not a semiotic function in its own right. The result is a flattening of ontological depth: language, paralanguage, and context are treated as interchangeable vectors of tone, all carrying the same mysterious essence called “spirit.”
In short, this passage exemplifies the paralinguistic projection error — projecting features of embodied performance onto writing, then mistaking their correlates for linguistic functions. It repeats the earlier stratification error (collapsing semantics into context) and compounds it with a modality conflation (collapsing sound, writing, and image).
Reflective Coda: The Soft Ontology of Feeling
Across this chapter, the same pattern recurs: a gradual erosion of semiotic boundaries in the name of empathy. Each time “spirit” or “tone” is invoked, distinctions between language, image, and context blur — as if warmth of feeling required ontological softness. But empathy does not arise from flattening structure; it arises from inhabiting difference. When we conflate strata to explain “feeling,” we lose not only theoretical clarity but the very relational depth that meaning depends upon.
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