Sunday 1 July 2018

Behavioural Processes: The Anomalous Verb ‘Watch’

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 302):
The verb watch is anomalous: in I’m watching you, the tense suggests a behavioural process but the you appears as a participant, like the Phenomenon of a ‘mental’ clause.  Since this is restricted to watch, we can label this participant as Phenomenon, indicating the ‘mental’ analogue.