ABSTRACT
ONE CANNOT BE satisfied with an interpretation of laughing and crying only. One has also to consider their relationship to smiling. F.J. Buytendijk published a study on the child’s first smile and regards it — like many other authors — as a weak form of laughing. Plessner did not agree. Smiling is not characterized by explosivity, the coarse release of affect. Smiling can initiate laughing or end it; it can replace laughing “but it has its own unalterable characteristics, its own specific propriety; it is a form of expression sui generis.” When analyzed biosemiotically as expression of inner adaptation, both the closeness and the difference become clear.
