CLAUSE AS REPRESENTATION
5.1 Modelling experience of change
5.1.2 Types of process
Our most powerful impression of experience is that it consists of a flow of events, or
‘goings-on’. This flow of events is chunked into quanta of change by the grammar of the clause: each quantum of change is modelled as a figure — a figure of happening, doing, sensing, saying, being or having (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). All figures consist of a process unfolding through time and of participants being directly involved in this process in some way; and in addition there may be circumstances of time, space, cause, manner or one of a few other types. These circumstances are not directly involved in the process; rather they are attendant on it. All such figures are sorted out in the grammar of the clause. Thus as well as being a mode of action, of giving and demanding goods-&-services and information, the clause is also a mode of reflection, of imposing order on the endless variation and flow of events. The grammatical system by which this is achieved is that of TRANSITIVITY (cf. Halliday, 1967/8). The transitivity system construes the world of experience into a manageable set of PROCESS TYPES. Each process type provides its own model or schema for construing a particular domain of experience as a figure of a particular kind — a model such as the one illustrated above for construing signification: Token (usually) + Process (means) + Value (mostly).
What are the different types of process, as construed by the transitivity system in the grammar? The picture we derive from English is something like this. There is a basic difference, that we become aware of at a very early age (three to four months), between inner and outer experience: between what we experience as going on ‘out there’, in the world around us, and what we experience as going on inside ourselves, in the world of consciousness (including perception, emotion and imagination). The prototypical form of the ‘outer’ experience is that of actions and events: things happen, and people or other actors do things, or make them happen. The ‘inner’ experience is harder to sort out; but it is partly a kind of replay of the outer, recording it, reacting to it, reflecting on it, and partly a separate awareness of our states of being. The grammar sets up a discontinuity between these two: it distinguishes rather clearly between outer experience, the processes of the external world, and inner experience, the processes of consciousness. The grammatical categories are those of materialprocess clauses (see Section 5.2, p. 179) and mentalprocess clauses (see Section 5.3, p. 197), as illustrated by I’m having a showerand I don’t want a shower. Text examples of these, and of other process types, are given in Table 5(1). For instance,you produce so much moneyis a ‘material’ clause, construing the outer experience of the creation of a commodity, but I was fascinated by itis a ‘mental’ one, construing the inner experience of an emotion. Or, to construct a contrastive pair,the machine is producing (sorting,destroying)moneyis ‘material’, whereas people love(hate,want)moneyis ‘mental’.
In addition to material and mental processes — the outer and inner aspects of our experience, a third component has to be supplied, before this can become a coherent theory of experience. We learn to generalize — to relate one fragment of experience to another:
this is the same as that, this is a kind of the other. Here, the grammar recognizes processes of a third type, those of identifying and classifying; we call these relationalprocess clauses (see Section 5.4, p. 210), as in usually means mostly. For instance,every fourth African is a Nigerian is a classifying ‘relational’ clause and The three major groups in the nation are the Yoruba in the southwest, the Ibo in the southeast, and the Hausa, finally, in the north is an identifying one, as is the example in Figure 5-1 above.
Material, mental and relational are the main types of process in the English transitivity system. But we also find further categories located at the three boundaries (see Section 5.5, p. 248); not so clearly set apart, but nevertheless recognizable in the grammar as intermediate between the different pairs — sharing some features of each, and thus acquiring a character of their own. On the borderline between ‘material’ and ‘mental’ are thebehaviouralprocesses: those that represent the outer manifestations of inner workings, the acting out of processes of consciousness (e.g.people are laughing) and physiological states (e.g. they were sleeping). On the borderline of ‘mental’ and ‘relational’ is the category of verbalprocesses: symbolic relationships constructed in human consciousness and enacted in the form of language, like saying and meaning (e.g. the ‘verbal’ clause we say, introducing a report of what was said: that every fourth African is a Nigerian). And on the borderline between the ‘relational’ and the ‘material’ are the processes concerned with existence, the existential, by which phenomena of all kinds are simply recognized to ‘be’ — to exist, or to happen (e.g.today there’s Christianity in the south). This closes the circle.*
It does not matter, of course, where we move in: we started with the material, partly because they are the most accessible to our conscious reflection, but also because (for that very reason) throughout most of the history of linguistics they have been at the centre of attention. They have, for example, been the source of the traditional distinction between
‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ verbs. There is no priority of one kind of process over another.
But they are ordered; and what is important is that, in our concrete visual metaphor, they form a circle and not a line. (More accurately still, they could be shown to form a sphere;
but that becomes too complex a metaphor to handle graphically.) That is to say, our model
M o d e l l i n g e x p e r i e n c e o f c h a n g e
Table 5(1)Examples of different process types from ‘Interview of Chinua Achebe’
Process type Example (Process + participants underlined; Process in bold; circumstances in italics) material During the European scramble for Africa, Nigeria fellto the British.
and the British ruled ituntil 1960 behavioural people are laughing.
mental The Ibos did not approve of kings.
verbal so we say→that every fourth African is a Nigerian
Can you tell usabout the political and cultural make-up of Nigeria?
relational that every fourth Africanis a Nigerian.
existential so todaythere’s Christianityin the south
* The minor process types appear to vary more across languages than the major ones. For example, in certain languages (English being one of them), existential clauses appear as a distinct type, but in other languages they may be very close to possessive and/or locative relational clauses.
of experience, as interpreted through the grammatical system of transitivity, is one of regions within a continuous space; but the continuity is not between two poles, it is round in a loop. To use the analogy of colour: the grammar construes experience like a colour chart, with red, blue and yellow as primary colours and purple, green and orange along the borders; not like a physical spectrum, with red at one end and violet at the other. A diagrammatic summary is given in Figure 5-2.
Figure 5-2 represents process type as a semiotic space, with different regions representing different types. The regions have core areas and these represent prototypical members of the process types; but the regions are continuous, shading into one another, and these border areas represent the fact that the process types are fuzzy categories (for discussions of the implications of the visual metaphor, see Martin and Matthiessen, 1991; Matthiessen, 1995a).
Thus while David told us that the moon was a balloonis a prototypical example of a ‘verbal’
clause with a Receiver (us) and a reported clause (that the moon was a balloon) which could alternatively be quoted (David told us: ‘the moon is a balloon’) and red indicates dangeris a prototypical example of a ‘relational’ clause with a ‘be’ type of verb (cf.red is danger),the data indicate that the moon is a balloonis intermediate between the two. There are reasons for interpreting the data indicate that the moon is a balloonas ‘relational’ (since, for example, there is no quoted version; we cannot say, retaining the intended meaning:the data indicate
‘the moon is a balloon’). But wherever we draw the line between ‘verbal’ and ‘relational’,the data indicate that the moon is a balloon will be closer to the border area than any of the
having attribute existing
happening [being created]
creating, changing
doing (to), acting
behaving seeing
feeling thinking
saying symbolizing having
identity
world of abstract relations
being doing sensing physical
world
world of consciousness mate
rial
mental behavioural
relational
existential
verb al
Fig. 5-2 The grammar of experience: types of process in English
prototypical examples are. This is not an artefact of the way we describe the system; it is a fundamental principle on which the system is based — the principle of systemic indeterminacy. The world of our experience is highly indeterminate; and this is precisely how the grammar construes it in the system of process type (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999: 547–62). Thus, one and the same text may offer alternative models of what would appear to be the same domain of experience, construing for example the domain of emotion both as a process in a ‘mental’ clause (this pleased God; cf. also God liked this) and as a participant in a ‘relational’ one (this made God sad;God was sad):
Now Noah was a good man and this pleasedGod. But all around him, Noah’s neighbors were lying and fighting and cheating and stealing. This madeGod sad. ... In time the earth was filled with people once again. And God washappy.
There are a number of experiential domains, such as emotion, that are given such a multifaceted interpretation by the grammar of transitivity. Such domains are experientially difficult to come to terms with, and the grammar solves the problem by offering complementary models for construing them. Halliday (1998) shows how the grammar has solved the problem of dealing with our experience of pain by offering an impressively rich range of alternative interpretations (cf.my head is painful,my head hurts,my head hurts me, my head is hurting,I have a headache,I feel a pain in my head).
The semiotic space shown in Figure 5-2 above can be interpreted systemically as a system network; see Figure 5-3. Like all system networks, this network construes a continuous semiotic space. There are a number of simultaneous systems, the systems of AGENCY and PROCESS TYPE and a set of circumstantial systems. We will deal with AGENCY and the circumstantial systems in Section 5.1.3, p. 175 and discuss PROCESS TYPE briefly here.
M o d e l l i n g e x p e r i e n c e o f c h a n g e
↓ identifying +Token;
+Value
↓ attributive + Carrier;
+Attribute
↓ existential + Existent
↓ verbal + Sayer
↓ mental + Senser;
Senser: conscious
↓ behavioural + Behaver;
Behaver: conscious
↓ material +Actor
major PROCESS TYPE
relational
Fig. 5-3 TRANSITIVITY represented as system network
The system of PROCESS TYPE represents the overall space in Figure 5-2 above; and the terms represent the regions within this space that shade into one another.* The system has six terms (exemplified in Table 5(1) above) — ‘material’, ‘behavioural’, ‘mental’, ‘verbal’,
‘relational’ and ‘existential’; and each term is the entry condition to a more delicate part of the network that represents the grammar of that particular process type. The account is taken only a few steps in delicacy; but it could be taken much further, towards systems that are realized lexically (as is shown for certain ‘material’ clauses by Hasan, 1987). The grammar of each process type will be presented below in Section 5.2, p. 179, to Section 5.5 (p. 197). Meanwhile, we shall discuss the different process types at work in the construction of discourse.
The examples given in Table 5(1) have not been constructed to illustrate the full range of each type of process. Rather, they are natural examples from a particular text, selected to illustrate the contribution made by different process types in the construction of discourse.
The text is an interview with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, an extract of which is analysed in Table 5(46), p. 304. In this extract, the interviewer starts with a ‘verbal’ clause, demanding information from Achebe. His response consists mainly of ‘material’ and
‘relational’ clauses: the ‘material’ clauses construe events and actions in Nigeria’s history, with Nigeria or the British as the Actors, while the ‘relational’ ones serve to characterize Nigeria and its population. There are two ‘existential’ clauses with thereas Subject (ellipsed in the second clause), representing the existence of Christianity and Islam in different parts of the country; and these is one ‘verbal’ clause,we say, serving to introduce a report of what is said, that every fourth African is a Nigerian. This first response contains no ‘mental’ or
‘behavioural’ clauses, but in Achebe’s second response there are four ‘mental’ clauses, with either the speaker (I) or the Ibos as the Senser. One of these ‘mental’ clauses,I suspect, is like the ‘verbal’ clause we say: it sets up or introduces what is suspected as a report — they did.
Clauses of different process types thus make distinctive contributions to the construal of experience in text. The extract from the interview is experientially varied, although
‘material’ and ‘relational’ clauses dominate. Part of the ‘flavour’ of a particular text, and also of the register that it belongs to, lies in its mixture of process types. For example, recipes and other procedural texts are almost entirely ‘material’, whereas ‘verbal’ clauses play an important role in news reports and ‘mental’ clauses are a typical motif in casual conversation. The mixture of process types characteristic of a text belonging to a particular register typically changes in the course of unfolding of the text. For example, the setting or orientation of a narrative is often dominated by ‘existential’ and ‘relational’
clauses, but the main event line is construed predominantly by ‘material’ clauses. In making these varied contributions to discourse, the different process types have evolved
* Systemic terms are not Aristotelian categories. Rather they are fuzzy categories; they can be thought of as representing fuzzy sets rather than ‘crisp’ ones (cf. Matthiessen, 1995a). Right from the start, systems in system networks were used to represent clines in the description of intonation (Halliday, 1967). Martin and Matthiessen (1991) discuss how the ‘topological’ view exemplified by Figure 5-2, p. 179, and the
‘typological’ one exemplified by Figure 5-3, p. 197, complement one another. For a general discussion of the problem with Aristotelian categories in accounts of language, see Ellis (1993); for discussion of this book, see Halliday (1995a).
distinctive grammatical properties. Even in the short extract from the interview, we can begin to see the properties characteristic of each process type. Thus ‘relational’ clauses are characterized by a few favourite verbs — in particular,beandhave. ‘Mental’ clauses must be construed with one conscious participant (I,the Ibos), while ‘material’ clauses have a more varied central participant that may or may not be a conscious being (Nigeria, the British,this,you). Both ‘verbal’ and ‘mental’ clauses are characterized by their ability to introduce what is said or thought as a report — a property distinguishing them from all the other process types. ‘Existential’ clauses are unique in that the Subject is not a participant but rather the item there, which represents only ‘existence’, not the participant that exists; this participant comes after the Process. In Section 5.2 to Section 5.5, we shall introduce the process types and their grammar more systematically. In the meantime, we shall explore the experiential elements that make up the transitivity structure of a clause.