The first half of this paper advocates the necessity of giving more consideration to the conceptual nature and the terminological use of the POWER and DISTANCE parameters which affect language production and interpretation; it also calls for an extra parameter to be added: AFFECT, as separeted from DISTANCE. In the second half of the paper, it is argued that DISTANCE is not a single, fundamental 'horizontal' dimension, whilst POWER emerges as a relatively unitary 'vertical' dimension, though some connotations may not be crossculturally valid.