Thursday 31 December 2015

Transitivity Profile & Temporal Profile

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 468-9):
The two perspectives are not unrelated of course. As we shall see the specification of an element of transitivity structure may determine the temporal profile: the created Goal that constitutes the completion of the performance of the process (as in Mr. Blandings built a house), a Range that constitutes its finite scope (They sang two Hungarian folk songs), a destination that gives its spatio-temporal endpoint (He walked to the store), a resultative Attribute that constitutes the (qualitative) endstate (He was shot dead), and so on. But the mere presence of such an element is not sufficient to determine the temporal profile; it is also influenced by the ‘boundedness’ of the elements: are they in infinite supply or not — a definite number of units, or an indefinite number?  In general, then, the temporal profile is determined by other factors such as the presence, and the boundedness in quantity, of participants and circumstances.