Thursday 15 December 2016

Metaphorical Kissing


Actor
Process: material
Goal

congruent
he
kissed
his sister

he
gave
his sister
a kiss
metaphorical
Actor
Process: material
Recipient
Goal


Because grammatical metaphor is a junctional construct, the metaphorical expression construes 'his sister' both as the Goal and as the Recipient of the Process 'kiss', and construes 'kiss' both as Process and as gift (Goal: the Medium of giving).

The advantages of the metaphorical construal of a process as a participant include:
  • it can be sub-classified, as in he gave his sister a perfunctory and very reluctant kiss,
  • it can be given thematic status in a message, and 
  • it can be given modal responsibility in a proposition.

Tuesday 6 December 2016

Time Phase Vs Reality Phase In Identifying Processes

Phase: time: inceptive
that cute little baby
became
Adolf Hitler
Token
Process: relational: identifying: intensive
Value

Phase: reality: realised
his first novel
proved
the most successful
Token
Process: relational: identifying: intensive
Value 

For time phase vs reality phase, see here.

Saturday 3 December 2016

The Transitivity Of Labile Verbs

the pot
broke
Actor/Medium
Process: material


I
broke
the pot
Initiator/Agent
Process: material
Actor/Medium

See Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 339, 351-3).

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 340):
As we noted above, if we examine the lexis of modern English, and look up large samples of verbs in a good dictionary, we find that many of them, including the majority of those that are in common use, carry the label ‘both transitive and intransitive’. If we investigate these further, we find that where the same verb occurs with each of these two values the pairs of clauses that are formed in this way, with the given verb as Process, are not usually intransitive/transitive pairs but non-ergative/ergative ones. There are intransitive/transitive pairs, like the tourist hunted/the tourist hunted the lion, where the tourist is Actor in both. But the majority of verbs of high frequency in the language yield pairs of the other kind, like the tourist woke/the lion woke the tourist, where the relationship is an ergative one. If we express this structure in transitive terms, the tourist is Actor in the one and Goal in the other; yet it is the tourist that stopped sleeping, in both cases. Compare the boat sailed/Mary sailed the boat, the cloth tore/the nail tore the cloth, Tom’s eyes closed/Tom closed his eyes, the rice cooked/Pat cooked the rice, my resolve weakened/the news weakened my resolve.