Experiential Meaning and Transitivity System

Vocabulary flashcards covering the concepts of Experiential Meaning, Transitivity System, Process Types, Participant Roles, Ergative Verbs, and Phase from Systemic Functional Grammar notes.

Transitivity System

A grammatical system that deals with the content expressed in language and realizes the experiential metafunction.

Experiential Metafunction

The functional domain of language that organizes and represents our experience of the world.

Process

The central part of a situation, realized by a verb, which includes types of doing, happening, experiencing, being, and existing.

Participant Roles

Elements in a clause that symbolically represent the persons, things, and abstract entities involved in a process.

Attributes

The elements in a clause that characterize, identify, or locate a participant.

Circumstances

Attendant conditions in a situation, such as time, place, manner, and condition.

Material Processes

Processes of 'doing' (e.g., kick, run, eat, give) or 'happening' (e.g., fall, melt, collapse, slip).

Mental Processes

Processes of 'experiencing' or 'sensing' (e.g., see, hear, feel, know, like, want, regret).

Relational Processes

Processes of 'being' (e.g., be, seem) or 'becoming' (e.g., become, turn), where a participant is characterized, identified, or situated circumstantially.

Actor

The participant in a material process that performs or initiates the action of doing.

Goal

The participant in a material process that is acted upon, targeted, or affected by the process.

Recipient

The participant who receives an entity in a material process (e.g., 'the cat' in 'Ed gave the cat a bit of tuna').

Beneficiary

The participant for whom an action is performed (e.g., 'me' in 'fetch me a glass of water').

Range

An element in a material process providing information about the extent, range, or scope of the process (e.g., 'the summit' in 'reached the summit').

Ergative Verbs

Verbs that can be used both in intransitive clauses and in passive voice clauses with the same subjects (e.g., 'The door opens' / 'Paul opened the door').

Phase

A grammatical structure in which two verbs represent a process, with the first verb adding information (such as time, reality, effort, or manner) about the process represented by the second verb.