Apart from the heart and other internal body organs (see Sharifian et al. forthcoming), the face is arguably the most important part of the human body, probably as a result of its position on it as well as its function in human verbal and non-verbal communication. In Greek, there are no less than six unrelated lexicalizations of the concept of face (prosopo, fatsa, mutro, muri, mapa, mutsuna), some of them varying in register and style and all of them exhibiting metonymic and metaphorical extensions. The investigation of data from two Greek language corpora and five dictionaries reveals that all six words also exhibit a very high frequency of occurrence in idioms and collocations. Moreover, it has been recently argued (Marmaridou 2006) that a current cultural model of the self, motivating Greek pain lexicalizations and constructions, distinguishes between the rational self as the locus of consciousness and judgement, the non-rational self, the psyche, as the locus of emotions and feelings, the social self as the locus of social roles and interactions, and the physical self as the locus of physical characteristics and sensations. In this study it is argued that the human face, as an aspect of the physical self, embodies aspects of the rational, non-rational and social selves, thereby substantiating the proposed THE NON-PHYSICAL IS PHYSICAL metaphor and motivating the semantic extensions of the various lexicalizations of face in Greek. Moreover, the distribution of these lexicalizations in idioms and collocations points to a high degree of constructional entrenchment and the conventionalization of these metaphorical extensions in the language. Given that the human face has been associated not only with appearance, but also with emotion, character and social interaction in various, often genetically unrelated, language-culture complexes, such as English, Chinese and Hebrew (Yu 2001, Kidron & Kuzar 2002), it is possible to further argue for the tenability of the embodiment hypothesis and the interaction of metaphor and cultural models in motivating lexicalizations and constructions. (Sophia Marmaridou)