The Claim That The Face Does Not Express Desire

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 152, 156):

The possibility of different paralinguistic resources being instantiated simultaneously allows us to infer meanings not necessarily interpretable from an expression in a single paralinguistic mode. For example, FACIAL AFFECT has no distinct option for the expression of desire. However, when raised eyebrows and wide-opened eyes (realising FACIAL AFFECT as [surprise]) are expressed convergently with PARALINGUISTIC PROXIMITY as [personal] and PARALINGUISTIC ORIENTATION as [involved], the emotion of desire is strongly invoked. Two such instances are described in (29).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a serious omission in the authors' model. The bodily expression of desire is enshrined in Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

and at least one of the following facial expressions might reasonably be construed as expressing desire:

[2] To be clear, the authors' claim here is that a personal, involved expression of surprise "invokes" (i.e. evokes) an expression of desire. In contrast, none of the desiring faces above look at all surprised.

The Contextual Dependence Of The Meaning Of Body Orientation

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 149):

Greater or lesser involvement is realised through the horizontal angle between the characters and the presence or absence of accompanying gaze. At one end the features [involved] indicates maximum involvement though face-to-face orientation accompanied by mutual gaze. At the other end of the continuum there is an absence of involvement; the interlocutors share no gaze and have a widely oblique or even back-to-back orientation in relation to each other. Between these endpoints, body (and head) angle varies and involvement with the other may be enhanced by direct gaze or weakened by a lack of it. An oblique angle to another realises a [less involved] or relatively detached orientation, while face-to-back indicates [involvement sought] or a desire to engage and back-to-back indicates [uninvolved] or thorough disengagement. A side-by-side orientation on the other hand realises a solidarity relation but yet [less involved]. Note that the head and the body can be angled relatively independently so there are more points on the continuum than actually specified here.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the 'involvement' meanings of these body orientations depend crucially on context. For example, consider the "solidarity" of two strangers sitting side-by-side on public transport or in a waiting room, or the "involvement sought" of two strangers face-to-back in a queue, or in former times, of "uninvolved" orientation of two duellists standing back-to-back before trying to kill each other.

A Problem With The System Of Paralinguistic Orientation

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 149, 150):

Analogising from Kress and van Leeuwen’s account of viewer/depiction relations referred to as INVOLVEMENT, Painter et al. (2013) propose a system of body ORIENTATION as an additional means for interpreting relations between depicted characters in images. Figure 5.16 shows options in a system of PARALINGUISTIC ORIENTATION and how they are relatively positioned as degrees of involvement.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Kress and van Leeuwen’s original system is construed in terms of content (INVOLVEMENT), whereas the authors' rebranding of it is construed in terms of expression (ORIENTATION).

[2] To be clear, the system in Figure 5.16 models paralanguage as a bi-stratal semiotic system, and although this is consistent with the notion of a semiotic system, it is inconsistent with the preceding chapters in which paralanguage is misunderstood as an expression-only semiotic system. Where in previous chapters it was just paralinguistic expression that was semovergent with language, in this chapter it is both paralinguistic content and expression that is semovergent with language.