23 September 2024

The Paralinguistic Force Of Facial Affect Reconsidered

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 124):

Linguistic GRADUATION comprises two principal subsystems – FORCE and FOCUSFORCE can function to adjust the relative intensity or quantity of inscribed attitude or to invoke an attitudinal meaning by grading ideational phenomena. FOCUS has to do with adjusting the categorical boundaries of phenomena as more or less sharply or softly defined (Hood, 2010, 2021; Hood and Zhang, 2020). However, unlike its linguistic counterpart and unlike the PARALINGUISTIC GRADUATION of body gestures (Hao and Hood, 2019; Hood and Zhang, 2020), FACIAL AFFECT can only be graded in FORCE. Features of [strong] to [weak] are shown as positions on a cline in Figure 5.4, realised through variations in muscle tension and/or the duration for which an expression is held.


Blogger Comments:

As previously demonstrated, the facial expression of emotion is not an interpersonal system of language, so the linguistic systems of APPRAISAL, such as ATTITUDE and GRADUATION, do not apply. Instead, from the perspective of SFL Theory, the facial expression of emotion serves the personal microfunction of protolanguage, and so what is presented here as graduated force is more consistently understood as a graduation of emotional intensity within the personal microfunction.

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