Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 125-6):
Expressions of relative FORCE in FACIAL AFFECT are additionally realised through the relative duration over which an expression is held. …
In example (6), Coraline, having sensed danger, tells her Other Parents that she wants to go to bed. Her intention is to escape from the Other world in her sleep. However, the Other Parents follow closely behind her, the Other Mother even offering to tuck her into bed.
Coraline’s anxiety is not revealed in the spoken exchange with the Other Mother but rather in her expression of FACIAL AFFECT as [spirit:down] realised through eyebrows raised and drawn together and downcast eyes. The expression is extended in duration, sustained over the three tone groups of the exchange (marked as //…//…//…).
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As previously argued, from the perspective of SFL Theory, these graded epilinguistic images are of the personal microfunction of protolanguage depicted on clay puppets by animators using the emotion-face code devised by Ekman.
[1] To be clear, since the authors claim (p123-4) that expressions of surprise typically have the briefest duration, the claim here is that surprise is typically has weaker force than other emotions.
[2] To be clear, the Coraline character is here concealing her anxiety from the other characters, as the spoken language demonstrates, so as not to raise suspicion, so the interpretation of this facial configuration — in which the eyes are not downcast — expressing any anxiety at all, let alone stronger anxiety, would seem to be the opposite of what is true.
The Praat waveforms are irrelevant here, since they just represent the articulation of consonants and vowels.
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