Friday 10 June 2016

Syntactic Variables Distinguishing Process Types

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 559) 
… the grammar distinguishes a number of types of process, material, mental, verbal and relational; the distinctions are made by a cluster of syntactic variables —
the valency of associated participant rôles,
the class of entity that takes on each rôle,
the potential for combining with other figures,
the associated tense systems and the like.