Misrepresenting Mental Process Subtypes

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 100):

PROCESS TYPE is the resource for sorting out our experience of all kinds of events into a small number of types. These differ with respect to both the Process itself and the participants involved in it – the number and kind of participants. The system discriminates six different types of process in English. The three major ones are material, mental and relational, each with a small set of subtypes. In addition, there are three further process types, the behavioural, verbal and existential. These six kinds of clauses are illustrated in Table 4.2

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To be clear, Table 4.2 misnames mental processes of 'emotion' as mental processes of 'affection', and omits mental processes of desideration altogether, despite the fact that, from a semantic perspective, desideration is central, as Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 143-4) explain:

Emotion seems to be closer to quality-ascription than to a prototypical process; it arises from, but does not create, projections. In contrast, perception is essentially closer to behavioural processes. 

Cognition and desideration are different from both in that they can project (i.e., bring the content of consciousness into existence), can stand for modalities, and are not in general like either behaviour or ascription; they may be interpreted as the most central classes of sensing.