People interested in those issues might like to know that both
Jim Martin and I, rather independently, are working on the
analysis of the semantic resources of English (at a level of
abstraction where similarities to many other languages are quite
likely) for the construction of meanings for affect, judgment,
appraisal, evaluation, attitude, etc. We situate these,
consistently with the social semiotics view we and others have
developed from Halliday original functional model of language, as
part of the Interpersonal, or Social Orientational function.
What this means, I think, for the discussion here, is that
language itself provides some significant evidence that affect is
a dimension of social-relational processes, and so constituted by
and constitutive of these in general. There is a certain unity
among the practices by which we linguistically construct the
meanings we call personal feelings or reactions to events, and
those we call our evaluations of persons and events, propositions
and proposals. The most objectified form of our evaluations sound
to us more like more facts about the world, when they are just
variations of our feelings about the world. And likewise our
inner feeling states, as we construct them with the aid of
culture-embodying languages, are transforms or reflexes of the
ways in which we orient ourselves in social relationships to
others and to the imagined viewpoints of Others. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU