The Complementarity Of The Transitive And Ergative Models Of Transitivity

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 333-4):

These models are summarised in Table 5-37. We have constructed the table to suggest that (i) generalisation across process types and (ii) transitivity model are independently variable. In English and in many other languages, it is the transitive model that differentiates the different process types and it is the ergative model that generalises across these different process types. But the alignments could be different.