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 nominalisation, they may, of course, be realised as nouns - eg His fear was obvious to all.
Values of affect provide one of possibly the most obvious ways that a speaker can adopt a stance towards some phenomenon - they provide the resources by which the speaker can indicate how that phenomenon affected them emotionally, to appraise that phenomenon in affectual terms. This functionality is illustrated by the following extract from a newspaper feature article in which the author describes her own experiences as the adoptive mother of an Australian Aboriginal baby. (AFFECT values are in underline/bold).
As an adoptive family we have had pain and trauma, tears and anger, and sometimes despair. There has also been love and laughter and support from friends and extended family. My children have added richness to my life and taught me much about myself. (Sydney Morning Herald 4/6/97.)
Such evaluations or responses are, of course, inter-subjectively charged and put at risk solidarity between speaker and audience. By appraising events in affectual terms, the speaker/writer invites their audience to share that emotional response, or at least to see that response as appropriate and well motivated, or at least as understandable. When that invitation is accepted, then, solidarity or sympathy between speaker and listener will be enhanced. Once such an empathetic connection has been established, then there is the possibility that the listener will be more open to the broader ideological aspects of the speaker's position. When the invitation to share the emotional response is not taken up - when the affectual value is seen as inappropriate, or bizarre or dysfunctional etc - then solidarity or sympathy will most probably be diminished and the chance of ideological concord diminished.
We can see this strategy at work in the extract above. The article appeared at a time when Australian Aborigines were calling for a public apology and financial compensation for the Australian government's previous policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families and placing them with adoptive white parents. The policy had been described as a form of cultural genocide. A position generally supportive of the Aboriginal perspective had been widely adopted by the media and the political left and centre. The world view of the author of the extract was obviously at odds with this position, at least to the extent that for her the experience of raising two Aboriginal children had nothing to do with genocide and had not been grounds for shame and guilt. Her inclusion of AFFECT values of the type cited above can be seen as part of a strategy by which she was at least able to negotiate some space for her alternative, divergent social perspective. Her construing the issue in terms of basic human emotional responses could be expected to establish, at least in some readers, a sense of sympathy, a sense of common experiences and hence to enhance the possibility that her overall position in the article might be seen by readers as legitimate and well motivated.
The functionality of the author's own emotional responses in the construction of an interpersonal position is therefore relatively unproblematic. The formulation of APPRAISAL adopted here, however, takes into account not only authorial AFFECT but also emotional responses attributed to other social actors. The analysis relies on an observation of the way emotional reactions generally attract social evaluation as appropriate or inappropriate, as natural or unnatural and the way that description of emotions can be expected to trigger sympathetic or unsympathetic responses in the reader/listener. As well, we see the human participants introduced into a text not as isolated individuals but, potentially, as more generalised social types who will be seen to associate with a given socio-semiotic position according to their social characteristics. A reader who sympathises with the emotional response attributed to a given socio type is thus predisposed to legitimate the social position that socio type represents. We can see this dynamic at work in the following extract, taken from a letter to the editor of the Australian newspaper by an Australian of Vietnamese background. She was writing at a time when racism had become a hot media topic following the recent rise of an anti-Asian, anti-immigration and covertly racist political movement under the leadership of the independent parliamentarian, Pauline Hanson.
LAST week, Pauline Hanson attacked Footscray, labelling it an ethnic enclave that makes her feel like a foreigner in her own country.
Has Pauline Hanson been to Footscray? Is she aware of its proud tradition of struggle and hard work? Does she know about the waves of immigrants who have worked in its quarries, factories, workshops and businesses? Immigrants who have been part of the backbone of Australia's labour force and thankful for the opportunity to work and start a new life in this country. (The Australian, 4/6/97)
Here the writer is obviously concerned to negotiate intersubjective space for a social position sympathetic to the interests of immigrant Australians, in contradistinction to that advanced by Pauline Hanson and her followers. Accordingly the immigrants of one of Australia's most multicultural areas, the Melbourne municipality of Footscray, are evaluated positively through emotional responses attributed to them. Thus, they are declared to be `proud' of their hard work and struggle and to be ` thankful' for their opportunities in their new home. The writer establishes a stance towards a particular socio-semiotic reality via the affectual values she attributes to representatives of that reality.
