We describe a functional modeling of face movements during speech. The data consist of 65 face marker positions in (3) D coordinates measured while a speaker read a corpus. An arbitrary orthogonal factor analysis followed by a principal component analysis on the data resulted in a set of five interpretable factors that explains 87% of variance. The first factor that accounts for the vertical jaw motion dominates open/close movements of the mouth. Two principal factors describe the intrinsic lip gestures; one specifies spread vs. round in horizontal dimension and the other open with protrusion vs. retraction in vertical dimension. Both (horizontal) rounding and (vertical) opening contribute to the lip protrusion, which appears plausible from the biomechanical point of view.