Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 518):
The participants, on the other hand, which represent the prototype of entities persisting in time and space, are usually not subject to this [grammatical] kind of modification; but they are organised in fairly elaborate taxonomies. These may be construed as systematic relations among different lexical items: thus eyes, nose, mouth, chin are all different parts of face, and lamb, pork, mutton, beef are all different kinds of meat. Something of the same sort happens with verbs, but to a much lesser extent.