Other Interpersonal Resources

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 526-7):

Modality is a rich resource for speakers to intrude their own views into the discourse: their assessments of what is likely or typical, their judgments of the rights and wrongs of the situation and of where other people stand in this regard. But there are numerous other kinds of interpersonal meaning constructed by the resources of the grammar. These include comments about how desirable or plausible or self-evident something is, expressions of attitude in referring to persons and objects, sets of words with similar experiential meaning but distinguished interpersonally by connotation (sometimes called "purr words" and "snarl words"), and numerous forms of personal address and reference (kinship terms, personal names, honorifics, endearments, insults and the like).