Behavioural Processes: Middle ± Ranged

Halliday (1994: 139):

Collocation

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 648-9):

At the same time there are other instances of lexical cohesion that do not depend on any general semantic relationship of the types just discussed, but rather on a particular association between the items in question – a tendency to co-occur. This ‘co-occurrence tendency’ is known as collocation. For example,

A little fat man of Bombay
Was smoking one very hot day.
But a bird called a snipe
Flew away with his pipe,
Which vexed the fat man of Bombay.

There is a strong collocational bond between smoke and pipe, which makes the occurrence of pipe in line 4 cohesive. Clearly there is a semantic basis to a collocation of this kind; a pipe is something you smoke, and the words pipe and smoke are typically related as Range to Process in a behavioural process clause. Hence pipe here will be interpreted as ‘the pipe that he was smoking at the time’.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, smoke is not a behavioural Process, if only because pipe is not a Behaviour (the Range of a behavioural Process).

Range In Material & Behavioural Clauses: Scope, Behaviour

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 346):

In a ‘material’, the Range is the Scope; in a ‘behavioural’ clause, the Range is the Behaviour.

Circumstantial Indirect Participants

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 312):

We can make a contrast, then, between direct and indirect participants, using ‘indirect participant’ to refer to the status of a nominal group that is inside a prepositional phrase.  We have already seen that the participant rôles of (1) Client, Recipient and Receiver [i.e. Beneficiary] and (2) Scope, Behaviour and Verbiage [i.e. Range] are sometimes expressed ‘indirectly’ in this sense, as in gave money to the cashier, plays beautifully on the piano. The elements we are treating as ‘circumstantial’ are those in which the participant typically — and in many cases obligatorily — is indirect, being linked into the process via some preposition or other.

Behavioural Processes: Agency & Range

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 301):

Behavioural processes are almost always middle; the most typical pattern is a clause consisting of Behaver and process only, like Don’t breathe!, No one’s listening, He’s always grumbling. A common variant of these is that where the behaviour is dressed up as if it was a participant, like she sang a song, he gave a great yawn; this structure is typical in the everyday spoken language. The participant is analogous to the Scope of a ‘material’ clause (both being manifestations of the general function of Range); we shall call it Behaviour.