Misrepresenting Material And Verbal Clauses As Behavioural [2]

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 125-6):

Alternatively, if it is useful to highlight the relationship with an agnate mental or verbal clause, you may choose to label the second participant as Phenomenon or Verbiage:

Note that some behavioural clauses of the verbal subtype will also admit a Target role, as in:

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, analysing they solved the problem as a behavioural clause is inconsistent with SFL Theory, since the first participant is Agent, rather than Medium (Behaver), and the second participant — which is not a behaviour — is Medium, rather than Range (Behaviour):

[2] To be clear, analysing the Range of the anomalous verb watch as Phenomenon is the suggestion of Halliday (1994: 139):

The verb watch is anomalous: in I’m watching you, the tense suggests a behavioural process but the you appears as a participant, like the Phenomenon of a ‘mental’ clause. Since this is restricted to watch, we can label this participant as Phenomenon, indicating the mental analogue.

[3] To be clear, analysing they described the new project to the Board as a behavioural Process with one behavioural participant (Behaver) and two verbal participants (Verbiage and Receiver) is internally inconsistent, as well as inconsistent with SFL Theory. As previously noted, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 347) identify such clauses as verbal:

The two kinds of Verbiage, that which refers to the content, as in describe the apartment, and that which specifies the nature of the verbal process, like tell a story, are analogous respectively to the material ‘entity Scope’ and ‘process Scope’.

That is, consistent with verbal processes, the Medium is construed as a symbol source, and the Range is the content of what is said (Verbiage).

[4] To be clear, analysing they insulted her (to her face) as a behavioural clause is inconsistent with SFL Theory, since the first participant is Agent, rather than Medium (Behaver), and the clause does not accept a Range (Behaviour): they laughed a great laugh, but not they insulted a great insult. In SFL terms, the clause is simply a targeted verbal: