Linguistic evidence for a Lao perspective on facial expression

In the ongoing debate about emotions and their relationship with facial expression, James Russell has recently campaigned for "the gathering of new evidence" (1995: 382) concerning the nature and meaning of facial expressions across cultures and across languages. In this paper, I present data on some ways in which Lao people describe facial expression, as well as some of the ways they attribute inner states to people making particular facial displays. I first discuss briefly a number of words and expressions available in Lao for the description of emotions and other inner states. In the second section, I describe some of the ways in which Lao speakers isolate, recognise and describe particular facial expressions, as well as making some comments on their attribution of inner states (of thought, feeling, and/or emotion) to people making the expressions in question. One point I want to make is that "folk" analyses of semiotic phenomena, revealed in linguistic semantics, are fundamental to a well-informed comparative science of emotion and nonverbal communication.