Elements: Primary Types & Grammatical Realisations

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 177):

Elements serve as component parts of figures. Three primary types of element may be differentiated according to the generalised categories of configurational rôles: process, participant, and circumstance. In addition to these three, we need to recognise a fourth category of element, the relator; this is the element which forms figures into sequences. The congruent (prototypical) grammatical realisations of these types of element in English are as follows:

process î verbal group

participant î nominal group

circumstance î adverbial group; prepositional phrase

relator î conjunction group