Sunday 26 November 2017

Circumstances vs Participants

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 220):
Circumstantial elements are almost always optional augmentations of the clause rather than obligatory components. In contrast, participants are inherent in the process: every experiential type of clause has at least one participant and certain types have up to three participants – the only exception being, as just noted above, clauses of certain meteorological processes without any participants …