Faces Of Meanings

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 2005

Textos en Proceso, 2015

In current research on face analysis questions of who and what should be interpreted, as well as how, are of central interest. In English language research, this question has led to a debate on the concepts of P1 (laypersons, representing the "emic" perspective) and P2 (researchers, representing the "etic"). In our view, two points seem critical: a) are P1 and P2 sufficiently well described to be of use in the broader analytical context that is face analysis today? And b) what contribution does this distinction make towards a greater understanding of the data? From our research on facework in Spanish and address forms in European Portuguese, we view P1 and P2 as being far more complex than the literature suggests, with subgroups (different types of laypersons and researchers, respectively). At the micro-level we will describe the roles each subgroup plays in the interpretative process; at the macro-level we discuss how P1 and P2 are integrated into the global interpretation of face. While researchers of face analysis work typically consider P1 and P2 as independent categories, we believe the contributions of P1 and P2 cannot be disassociated. Both must be taken into account in the global analysis and final interpretative framework.

Ultimate Reality and Meaning

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2016

Face is a sociocultural construct which is based on the person’s sense of identity and expectations as to how his/her self-image should be created, and constitutes a property of relationship between interactants (cf. Arundale, 2006; Bousfield, 2008; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009). As such it appears to be strongly context dependent. Context is understood here as “aspects of the social environment” which become “observable” by their consequences on discourse, or by the influence of discourse on social situations (van Dijk, 2006, p. 164). Contexts of social interactions in which face is constituted are “subjective participant interpretations” of the relevant aspects of the social environment. The aims of the study are to analyse the mechanisms responsible for face creation during social interaction and to investigate the role of context as a subjective face-constituting factor. Face has a structure which can be compared to lettuce; it gets softer towards its centre. Some aspects of f...

2010

TOPOI, 2022

This article aims to make a philosophical contribution to the understanding of the communicative dimensions and functions of faces and facial expressions (FEs). First, I will refer to the expressivist and socio-communicative theories of FEs, and to a proposal to unify them under a pragmatic approach based on the theory of speech acts. Subsequently, I will examine the characterization of faces and FEs as social and behavioral affordances, and I will identify their characteristics and communicative functions, especially in "conversational displays", to justify why they are functionally special. I will then insert facial signals into the framework of a pragmatic perspective on human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, which is broader than speech act theory: a Pragmatics-First Approach to Human Communication. I will argue that it provides an adequate understanding of the pragmatic-interactive foundations of human communication, where Facereading is a central component. Finally, I will refer to the relationship between Facereading and the Second-person Perspective of social cognition. Keywords Facial expressions • Social and behavioral affordances • Nonverbal signals • Pragmatics-first approach • Conversational display • Facereading "…the face has far more to offer than affective signals alone." (Bodenhausen and Macrae 2006, p. 511)

This paper examines meaning in language. It is therefore a study in semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning in terms of the linguistics. Semantics begins from the stopping point of syntax and ends from where pragmatics begins. A separate discipline in the study of language, semantics has existed for decades. The term semantics was first used by Breal in 1987 and it does not suggest that there had never been speculations about the nature of meaning (Ogbulogo (2005). Words, phrases and sentences are used to convey messages in natural languages. Semantics is the study of meaning systems in language. If meaning is a system, then language is systematic in nature. In this paper, we investigate the nature of meaning to locate the significance of semantics in contemporary linguistics. Frege, cited in Sandt (1988:1) rightly notes that “... [If ] anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference.” Hinging on different submissions in the literature, we conclude that meaning is: socio-cultural, dynamic, grammar-driven, conventional, representative (referential), individualistic (non-conventional) and is not exhaustive.

Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2019

The second part of Philosophical Investigations and other contemporary writings contain abundant material dedicated to the examination of visual perception, along the lines of similarities and differences manifested in the use of concepts such as "seeing as", "seeing aspects", "noticing the aspect", "aspect blindness", among other related ones. However, their application to phenomena such as face perception and word perception, and similarities between the latter two, has not received proper attention in the literature. My first aim is identifying the features pertaining perceptual (and more widely, experiential) relationships we have with written language, showing in what ways they are strongly linked with some proper features of facial perception. In other words, I will try to show how the "phenomenology of reading" is akin to the "phenomenology of facial perception" or "physiognomy". Based on all this, my interpretative hypothesis is that, in Wittgenstein's view, the features shared by face and word perception are more deeply related than via a mere analogy; hence they might contribute to explain, in the case of words, a variety of specific semantic, perhaps semantic-pragmatic, phenomena, that should be included in an appropriate clarification of the varieties of use in natural languages.