Facial displays, emotional expressions and conversational acts

“Emotional expression is multifaceted – expression is determined both by a person’s reaction to an event and by the attempt to manipulate this expression for strategic reasons in social interaction." (Scherer, 2001). In thispaper we present some thoughts on the relation between emotion, facial expression and dialogue that have lead us to develop a model of dialogue in which the social views on language use are hooked up with theories of the sociology of emotions and in which facial expressions are mainly studied as discourseoriented actions without loosing track of the emotional antecedents and consequences that gave rise to them or that they raise.