The Representation Of Emotion On Clay Puppets As Paralanguage

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 115):

This chapter focuses on interpersonal meaning in paralanguage – on the ways in which the paralanguage of facial expression, voice quality, body gestures and positioning express feelings and enact social relations in cooperation with spoken language. The data are drawn from an award-winning stop-motion puppet animation film Coraline, directed by Henry Selick (2009) and based on a novella of the same name written by Neil Gaiman (2002).

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[1] To be clear, in modelling the facial expression of emotion in terms of a metafunction, the interpersonal, the authors present this semiotic system as one that requires the evolution and development of language. Clearly, the meaningful expression of emotion is not restricted to the one species in whom language has evolved, Homo sapiens, but is common to all social semiotic species. On this basis, the facial expression of emotion is a protolinguistic semiotic system, and in Halliday's model, is understood in terms of the personal microfunction.

[2] To be clear, the data for this chapter on paralanguage are not actually paralanguage, but representations of paralanguage constructed on clay puppets by animators, using  the emotion-face coding system of Ekman. The representation of paralanguage on clay puppets does require the prior development of language in the animators, and so is an epilinguistic semiotic system, in the terminology of Cléirigh's model.