Bob, check again the page on which you find these examples. They're listed
as MATERIAL processes, obviously.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Under mental process, Thompson provides the following
sets of sentences. (See page 80.)

He has been shaving.
The young girl bounded out of the gate.
Edward was sawing the wood.
Her mother smashed the glass.

The car slithered off the road.
Coarse grass was growing.
The unhappiness disappeared.

The fire had destroyed everything.
Scores of tiny brambles scratched him.
The pounding rhythm shook walls and floors.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

AH -- I see that was a typo on your part. you go on:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
The first set of sentences has animate subjects and the last two have
inanimate or
abstract subjects.  There is no explanation of the fact that these verbs,
which
represent the notion of material process, do so through a wide array of verb
structures.  The first grouping, for example, has an intransitive verb with
a zero
complement, an intransitive verb with an adverbial complement, and two
transitive
verbs.
This is a very strange set of verbs if, to Halliday's words, formal
structures are
“organic configurations of functions” or “[every grammatical structure] can
be
explained, ultimately, by reference to how language is used.”  (See his
Introduction to Functional Grammar 2nd edition, pages xiii-xiv.)   Given
Halliday's
underlying assumptions of SFG, it is perplexing that material process should
have
such a diverse set of verbs.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The point is precisely that Halliday chooses not to differentiate the formal
elements except in terms of their functionality in making meaning.

There does seem to be on your part a fundamental mis-recognition of
Halliday's notion of MATERIAL processes as structures of _transitivity_.
MENTAL processes are not, for instance, structures of transitivity - you
can't probe them w/ questions about DOING (what did x do?) Mental processes
(of thinking, feeling, perceiving) work DIFFERNTLY --  There are various
ways in which the functional components of the two sorts of process differ.
For instance, in a mental process, the subject [thinker/feeler] is by
definition endowed with consciousness, which is not the case with material
processes, and that which is sensed or thought is not something acted upon
but something projected. Halliday distinguishes six primary process types
for English and shows how each distinction has a reflex in the grammar. See
his work.

Thus the grammar attempts to describe how, on the dimension of
representation, there are fundamentally different process types available,
each of which makes different demands on the sorts of participants that
might be involved and the sorts of circumstances that might be associated.

Thus the questions that students ask of the language of a text, an
utterance, are fundamentally different -- they focus on meaning. But SFL is
not only a grammar -- it's a theory of language as a network of choices. The
grammar shows the sorts of choices that are possible on 3 dimensions of
"meta-function" that language serves: Representing the world, engaging with
others, and cohering as a message or text. There is a companion volume to
Halliday's Intro to Functional Grammar that gives a better picture of the
grammar as sets of choices:
Martin, JR, Matthiessen, C. & Painter, C., Working with Functional Grammar
(Arnold)
The theory is elsewhere, in drawing the networks that the grammar is based
on. But I'm not here to convince you or anyone else to like systemics --
it's difficult and it does indeed pose a fundamentally different vision of
language analysis.

judy

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