The general outlines of the grammar and semantics of affect are well understood. AFFECT is concerned with emotional response and disposition and is typically realised through mental processes of reaction (This pleases me, I hate chocolate, etc) and through attributive relationals of AFFECT (I'm sad, I'm happy, She's proud of her achievements, he's frightened of spiders, etc). Through ideational metaphor, they may, of course, be realised as nouns - eg His fear was obvious to all. Martin has developed a system for a fine-grained analyses of this semantic (See Martin 1997). I observe at this point, however, that values of affect occur as either positive or negative categories (love versus hate, please versus irritate, be bored versus be intrigued) and that each meaning is located along a sliding scale of force or intensity from low to high - thus like, love, adore; to be troubled by, the be afraid of, to be terrified of etc.
