Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 57-8):
The rôle restrictions for sensing, saying, and doing are summarised in Table 2(1) below.
These rôle restrictions represent a kind of metaphysics of English transitivity. For example, according to English, ideas and locutions cannot act on things, but there is no general restriction on what kinds of things may act on other things. Not only persons, but also inanimate things and abstractions may kill people (a figure of doing): the rifleman/the rock/his stupidity killed cousin Henry.
In contrast, if we had built our model according to the demands of the transitivity grammar of Navajo, we would have had to rank things in terms of their capacity to act upon other things; e.g., an inanimate cannot act upon an animate thing (Witherspoon, 1977).