Wednesday, 24 June 2015

The Potential Of Elements For Construing Experience: Process Features

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 265-6):
Processes do resemble other processes, but they share different features with different others; no single line-up is dominant enough to form the basis for permanent hyponymy. For example, if we consider a small subset of the words expressing verbal processes offer, tell, promise, threaten, recommend, warn:
(1) offer, promise, threaten have the feature ‘offer’; tell, recommend, warn have the feature ‘command’ 
(2) offer, tell are neutral in orientation; promise, threaten, recommend, warn have the feature ‘oriented to addressee’ 
(3) within the addressee-oriented, promise, recommend have the feature ‘desirable’, threaten, warn have the feature ‘undesirable’. 
(4) offer, promise, recommend take direct participant (‘propose to give … to Receiver’; ‘propose that Receiver should obtain …’). 
(5) tell, warn take circumstance of Matter ‘about …’.