SFL and the clause: The experiential metafunction

Kristin Davidse

(KU Leuven – University of Leuven)

1. Introduction

To broach the experiential analysis of the clause in SFL, it is essential to start from the principled
distinction between theory and description made by Halliday (1961, 1994: xxxiv). Linguistic theories
specify one’s fundamental assumptions about language and the nature of the linguistic sign. It is
within these assumptions that the facts of a language are described, i.e. its categories identified and
interpreted. The theoretical assumptions of SFL relevant to the experiential organization of the
clause are the following.

(1) Assuming Hjelmslev’s (1943[1946]) view of the linguistic sign, a distinction is made between
semantic purport, that factor of the content which is inter-translatable between languages, and
coded meaning, which is language specific. The lexicogrammatical structures and systems of an
individual language ‘form’ its specific semantics, “just as an open net casts its shadow down an
undivided surface” (1946: 57)1. This coding relation commits analysts to the requirement that “all the
categories employed must be clearly ‘there’ in the grammar of the language” Halliday (1994: xix).

(2) The grammar is a purely abstract code, which can be looked at only through the meaning or
through the expression. In Halliday's view, "our understanding of the meaning system itself is very
deficient; so the face of the grammar that is turned towards the semantics is hardly illuminated at
all" (Halliday 1985: xxxv). Therefore, the code has to be cracked basically through the form.

(3) Besides the coding, or ‘realization’, relation between semantics and lexicogrammar, the second
basic semiotic relation is that of instantiation. It defines structures and systems at various levels of
delicacy (Halliday 1961), ultimately linking the abstract language system to its concrete
instantiations, or usage tokens (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 21).

(4) Grammar and lexicon are viewed as one unified resource with lexis as the "most delicate
grammar" (Halliday 1961: 267).

(5) The whole clause, rather than the verb, determine experiential semantics (Halliday 1961, 1967a),
which are conceived of as process-participant configurations (i.e. interactions between, or relations
involving, things) to which circumstances may be related.

(6) Whilst being schematizable into general intransitive and transitive structures, experiential
semantics involve distinct types of configurations in three primary domains: (1) material, (2) mental
and (3) relational, that is to say, (1) actions and events observed 'out there' in the material world, (2)
conscious mental processing experienced 'in here', i.e. in the ‘egoic’ field (Whorf 1956: 163ff), and (3)
relational processes such as attribution and identification.

1
In the SFL tradition, the coded meaning and its lexicogrammar are equated with Hjelmslev’s content-
substance and content-form respectively. In parallel fashion, phonetic substance and phonological structures
and systems are equated with Hjelmslev’s expression-substance and expression-form (Taverniers 2008).

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 These theoretical assumptions have informed different descriptions in the SFL tradition amongst
which those of English (still) predominate, even though work on other languages has also been done
(see Sections 3, 4 and 5). Halliday (1994: xxxiv) himself wrote: “ There are many aspects of English
that need to be much more fundamentally re-examined than I have managed to achieve here; one
obvious example is the circumstantial elements in the clause, which I have treated in very traditional
fashion”. Cautioning against dramatic paradigm shifts per se, he continued “Twentieth-century
linguistics has produced an abundance of new theories, but it has tended to wrap old descriptions up
inside them … The old interpretations were good, but not good enough to last for all time… . What
are needed now are new descriptions”. As we have moved well into the 21st century, this adage is
still the crucial one to heed. It is, therefore, proper to look in the next section at Halliday’s early
(1967a,b, 1968) work on the general experiential categories of English, which inaugurated a
distinctive dialectic between theory and descriptive heuristics.

2. Historical perspective

Halliday’s “Notes on Transitivity and Theme” (1967a,b, 1968) and Fillmore’s (1968) “Case for case”
appeared at about the same time. Both publications deal with the representational semantics of the
clause, and because they both defined a set of roles that has been used extensively in their
respective traditions, they have sometimes been perceived as comparable proposals. In fact, they
could not be more different in a number of fundamental ways.
Halliday’s primary types of process-participant relations are identified in terms of (i) the specific
agnation paradigms of English, and (ii) the different selection restrictions obtaining on participants
and on the relation between participants and process types, such as [+conscious] for the Processer of
mental verbs (1968: 193). Agnates were defined by Gleason (1966: 199) as regular structural variants
that can accommodate identical lexical elements. In analytical languages like present-day English, the
different readings of ‘apparently identical structures’ can be shown up by their different agnation
paradigms. Gleason’s agnates are akin to Whorf’s (1956: 89) “reactances”, the distinct alternates
triggered by “submerged meanings”, which constitute the formal side of ”cryptotypical” (1956: 105)
linguistic categories, i.e. categories without systematic overt marking.
Halliday (1967a,b, 1968) identified different agnation paradigms that reveal distinct process-
participant relations in at first sight identical one- and two-participant syntagms, like (1a-c) and (2a-
c). He captured their distinct semantics by the different role configurations of (1) Actor + Goal versus
(2) Initiator + Actor. Examples (1a-c) constitute the ‘goal-directed’ paradigm, in which all clauses
express action being directed onto a Goal by an Actor (including (1b) John threw, which has an
inherent, rather than an overt Goal). Examples (2a-c) form the ‘causative’ paradigm, which does not
express an Actor targeting action onto a Goal, but in which ‘causation’ can be expressed by adding an
Initiator to the (non goal-directed) action of an Actor.

(1a) John threw the ball. (1b) John threw. (1c) The ball was thrown by John.
Actor Goal Actor Goal Actor
(2a) Mary jumped the horse. (2b) The horse jumped. (2c) The horse was jumped by Mary.
Initiator Actor Actor Actor Initiator

Semantic features such as [+goal-directed] and [+causative] capture the different ways in which the
agentive participant relates to the verb and the second participant. Halliday also points out the
latter’s different “inherent voice” relation to the verb (1968: 198): the ball is an undergoer only in
(1a,c) but the horse is both doer and undergoer in (2a,c). Specific selection restrictions attach to this

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second participant in (2a,c) in that it requires the features [+ animate], but [- control]. The distinct
agnation paradigms are related to “verb classes[, which] represent the potentiality on the part of
each verb of entering into each of the sets of relations involved” (Halliday 1967a: 52).
“Notes on Transitivity and Theme” set out the following participant roles within the primary
domains: Initiator – Actor – Goal – Range for material processes, Processer – Phenomenon for
mental processes, Attribuant – Attribute, and Value – Variable / Identified – Identifier for relational
processes. In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, some of these roles were renamed: Processer
became Senser, Attribuant became Carrier, and Variable was renamed Token. Besides the primary
process types, three secondary process types were introduced, which each combine formal and
semantic characteristics of two primary types. Behavioural processes such as watch and listen
construe an external (‘material’) perspective on processes of consciousness. Verbal processes are in
between mental and relational processes, describing the sending of symbolic representations by
typically conscious sources. Existential processes are in between relational and material processes,
construing an external perspective on the instantiation of categories.
At the most schematic level of the grammar, which transcends the domain-specific configurations,
Halliday (1968) formulated the following generalization: English clauses always have a participant
that is critically involved in the process, the Affected (which became the Medium in Halliday 1985).
To this nucleus an Agent may be added, making for a fully transitive configuration, like (1a) and (2a)
above, whose transitivity can be tested by the possibility of an unmarked passive (1c), (2c) (Halliday
1994: 165). Halliday characterized this as an ‘ergative’ generalization because, just as in ergative case
marked languages, there is always a participant embodying the change or relation described by the
verb (like the absolutive marked participant), while the cause of this change or relation (like the
ergative marked participant) may or may not be expressed. On the other hand, the Medium-process
nucleus may be extended by a Range specifying the ‘extent’ of the action, as in (3a) and (4a), yielding
a lowly transitive configuration, which does not have a reflexive agnate, as shown in (3b) and (4b),
and a marked passive only (Halliday 1967a: 58-60), as in (3c) and (4c).

(3a) John threw a tantrum. (3b) ≠John threw himself . (3c) A tantrum was thrown by John.
(4a) The horse jumped the fence. (4b) *The horse jumped itself. (4c) A fence was jumped by the horse.

The configurations specific to material, mental and relational processes can, in principle, also be
taken further down in delicacy. An example of this is Hasan’s (1988) fine-grained lexicogrammar of
verbs of ‘gain/loss of access to things’, which she presents as “an enquiry into what Whorf 1956
called ‘reactance’” (1988: 185) and which takes the description up to the specific features and
agnates of individual verbs. Relating Halliday’s (1968, 1985) most general part of the experiential
network to Hasan’s (1988) part at the most delicate end, we see that we move from maximally
distinct functional configurations, such as intransitive vs. transitive, to increasingly similar, sub-types
of configurations. Intransitive, transitive and ditransitive clauses differ from each other in the sense
of not sharing whole clusters of agnates or reactances. As we move down in delicacy, specifying for
instance different subtypes of ditransitive structures, as in Hasan (1988), we move into (partial)
subcategorization: “each progressive step in the network specifies identity and uniqueness between
classes of structures” (1988: 187).
In its use of agnates as a descriptive heuristic, Halliday’s work is compatible with other
approaches using ‘diathesis alternates’, i.e. the different possible expressions of the participant roles
of lexical verbs, to ”probe for linguistically pertinent aspects” (Levin 1993: 1) of clausal
representational semantics. Matthiessen (2014: 143-144) characterizes “Levin’s (1993) description of

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verb classes and alternations” as “located somewhere mid-way between the least delicate pole of
the cline, grammar, and the most delicate, lexis. … Looked at from the grammar end of the cline, her
description can be seen as dealing with micro-grammars of transitivity with specifications of
‘syntactic alternations’, like the transitivity of motion or the transitivity of perception; and looked at
from the lexis end, it can be seen as identifying grammatical generalizations about verb senses that
form lexical fields, like the field of motion or the field of perception”.
Fillmore (1968), by contrast, proposed one set of universal, purely semantic roles, such as Agent,
Objective, Instrument and Location, defined independently from syntax and assigned on the basis of
their ‘objectively’ perceived involvement in a state-of-affairs. Thus, poison and a sword are,
irrespective of their codings in (5a,b) and (6a), viewed as Instrument. DeLancey (1984) contrasted the
Fillmorean analysis with an alternation-based one, arguing that construing poison as Agent in (5b)
represents it as capable of independent action and direct causation, whereas a sword cannot be
represented as an Agent (6b), but only as an Instrument manipulated by an animate Agent (6a).

(5a) John killed Mary with poison. (5b) Poison killed Mary.
(6a) Gareth beheaded the dragon with a sword.(6b) *A sword beheaded the dragon.

Fillmore’s semantic approach was taken much further in delicacy in his Frame Semantics (1982),
which relate the meaning of verbs to all the encyclopaedic knowledge surrounding it, specifying
verbs’ characteristic interactions with things necessarily or typically associated with them. Whilst
different in theoretical and methodological orientation, purely semantic theories such as these (and
also e.g. Croft 1991) can suggest possible semantic features, such as [+ internal energy source], [+
involuntary], to linguists who want to interpret the different semantic fault lines drawn in specific
languages by covert categories residing in alternations ---and by overt categories such as case
marking and verbal morphology (see Section 3.3).

3. Critical issues

The following sections will look at some issues and different positions assumed with regard to them,
as well as at methodologies that can contribute to description and theory formation in the area of
experiential clause grammar. Different positions will be juxtaposed, but not to suggest that some are
wholly ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’, and different methodologies will be looked at, but not with the
idea that there is one that is good for all purposes. Rather, what matters is to keep linguistic thought,
argumentation and analytical practice alive in ongoing debates. The three main challenges
incumbent on linguists working on experiential clause grammar in the systemic functional tradition
are, in my view:

1) to critically compare the different positions found in various descriptions by Halliday and by other
SFL linguists with optimal form-meaning correlation as a standard;

2) to increase the granularity of descriptions of experiential grammar, as has always been stressed on
the theoretical level;
3) to draw up experiential analyses of languages different from English, and engage in cross-linguistic
analysis, given the theoretical commitment to linguistically-construed process-participant relations.

In what follows I will discuss these three critical issues in SFL descriptive practice, linking them in
each case to areas that are in need of further development.

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§1) Alternative descriptive proposals

The argued comparison of alternative proposals is an important aspect of any theoretical approach
bent on progress. A typical set of phenomena for which different analyses are available within SFL is
that of locative constructions such as (7a) and (8a). Halliday (1976: 160) analysed the prepositional
phrases at the bridge in (7a) and with stones in (8a) as participants ‘inherent’ in the verb, but he did
not return to this idea in later work. Later, he (1994: 159) stipulated that “systematic alternation
between a prepositional phrase and a nominal group” is required to interpret an element as a
participant, as is the case with Agents, which can be coded by a nominal or a by-phrase. This criterion
does not apply systematically to locative verbs, as some such as pelt alternate (8b) but others such as
throw not (7b).

(7a) He threw stones at the bridge. (7b) *He threw the bridge with stones
(8a) He pelted the dog with stones. (8b) He pelted the dog with stones.

Fawcett (1987), on the other hand, has always viewed constructions such as (7a) and (8) as three-
participant constructions. Concurring with Halliday’s earlier (1976) position, he (Fawcett 1987: 134)
views them as “inherently associated with the process expressed by the Main verb”. In addition, he
argues that this provides a better semantic generalization: two-term intensive, possessive and
circumstantial clause configurations have three-participant counterparts, expressing the causation of
attributive (9), possessive (10) and circumstantial relations (7) and (8). “[A] systemic grammar
provides a natural means of bringing out the remarkable similarities in the semantic features of
clauses with (a) have… and give, etc. (b) be… and make, etc. and (c) be … send, etc.” (Fawcett 1987:
131).

(9) She called the baby Ann (Fawcett 1987: 154)

(10) I’ve given Oliver a tie (Fawcett 1987: 146)

Questions that have puzzled linguists for decades are addressed but not fully solved in either
approach. For instance, why do some locative verbs alternate and others not? And why can the
notion of participants ‘inherent’ in the meaning of the verb not be related to a foolproof test such as
their non-omissibility? According to Pinker (1989: 108), “it’s not what possibly or typically goes in an
event that matters; it’s what the verb’s semantic representation is choosy about in that event that
matters”. Subclasses of verbs eligible to enter into a specific alternation have to be narrowly defined.
Pinker specifies, for instance, that ”only verb meanings that … allow one to predict both a particular
type of motion and a particular type of end state participate in the locative alternation “ such as
smear, spray and dribble (Laffut 2006: 34). However, it is not fully clear how this lexical-functional
approach can cope with gradience and change affecting alternations. In Section 5, it will be suggested
that the study of agnates/alternations can be expected to make progress with the quantitative and
qualitative interrogation techniques of extensive corpus data that are currently being developed.

§2. Delicacy

One area which in the general debate has tended to be taken one step further down in delicacy is the
different types of intransitives. Halliday (1968: 188) identified the primary contrasts in English
intransitives as instantiated by (11a)-(11b) and (12a)-(12b) and then considered the question how the
different types of process participant relations in the examples could be captured. On the one hand,

5
the distinction “can be represented in terms of actor and goal, the one being an actor - action
relation and the other a goal - action relation”, or, alternatively, John in (11a) and Mary in (12a) –
“where there is no external cause” – can be viewed as “causer/affected” and John in (11b) and the
clothes in (12b) as “affected” only. On the other hand, he ventured that “[we] may postulate some
feature distinction, perhaps that of action, or 'doing', as opposed to supervention, or 'happening”,
(1968: 188).

(11a) John sat down. (11b) John fell down.

(12a) Mary washed (sc. ‘herself’). (12b) The clothes washed.

In both functionally and formally oriented work, a subset of Halliday’s ‘superventive’ intransitive
clauses was singled out for more delicate characterization, viz. those allowing the causative-
inchoative, or ‘ergative’, alternation, in which the two-participant construal expresses the causation
of the one-participant variant, as in (13a)-(13b). Davidse ([1991] 1999: 108) proposed to reserve the
role Medium for the core participant of lexically ergative verbs like broke in (13): “An intransitive
Actor is the sole energy source of the action, whereas the Medium is not. Even when expressed by
middle clauses such as the branch moved, the glass broke, the door opened, [they] are felt to have a
second potential energy source.”. Levin & Rappaport (1994) argued that the subset of’ unaccusative’
verbs allowing the ergative alternation are inherently dyadic: they “inherently imply the existence of
an external cause” (1994: 50), even when no cause is explicitly specified in the intransitive. In both
approaches, the causative alternation is, as it were, ‘projected behind’ the syntagm in determining its
meaning (van den Eynde 1995: 118). From a comparative, typological point of view, Haspelmath
(1993), by contrast, elucidates the meaning of the intransitive alternates as ‘spontaneously occurring
events’, and associates the meaning ‘externally caused’ only with the transitive variant of
morphologically alternating verbs. Indirectly, this raises the question of the cognitive status of
alternation-based generalizations, which will be looked at from the point of view of sorting
experiments in Section 5.

(13a) The glass broke. (13b) Who/what broke the glass?

Levin & Rappaport (1994) also pointed out the importance of selection restrictions. It is typical of
the external cause, who/what in (13b), that it can be “natural forces or causes, as well as agents or
instruments” (1994: 50). On the other hand, specific lexical selection restrictions have to be present
for the subject + intransitive verb alternate to be available (1994: 46). For instance, corresponding to
(14a) we can get (14b), but there is no intransitive counterpart of (15a), as shown by the impossibility
of (15b).

(14a) The wind cleared the sky. (14b) The sky cleared. (Levin & Rappaport 1994: 46)
(15a) The men cleared the table. (15b) *The table cleared.

The fact that few English verbs allow the ergative alternation in all their subsenses had already
been recognized in Sinclair et al’s (1987) corpus-based Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary,
which systematically distinguishes ergative (“V-erg”) subsenses, often with their specific collocational
restrictions, from purely intransitive and transitive subsenses.

§3. Experiential analyses of languages different from English

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Most of the work in SFL has been done on English, whose experiential categories are strongly
cryptotypical. In this section we turn to languages which mark their experiential categories mainly
overtly, viz. by morphological marking on nouns and verbs. We will focus on one question: how does
the issue of generalized models of participant roles present itself from the perspective of languages
typologically different from English?
From an explicitly typological position, McGregor (1997: 99) converges with Halliday’s position:
“Halliday (e.g. 1967, 1968, 1985: 149) has proposed that both … the ergative … and the transitive …
[systems of participant roles] are relevant to the grammars of all languages. Evidence from a number
of languages supports this generalization”. The studies in Language Typology. A functional
perspective (2004) by and large concur with this with regard to French (Caffarel), German (Steiner
and Teich), Japanese (Teryua), Chineses (Halliday & McDonald), Vietnamese (Duc Thai ), Telugu
(Prakasam) and Pitjantjatjara (Rose).
However, Martin’s (1996) in-depth study of Tagalog arrived at a somewhat different position.
Martin (1996: 260ff) argued that Tagalog’s distinctive agnation patterns cannot be generalized over
as either having ‘Medium-process’ as the basic nucleus, to which an Agent may be added (i.e. the
ergative model) or as having ‘doer-process’ as the primary nucleus, to which a done-to may be added
(i.e. the transitive generalization). More specifically, neither model can capture the very systematic
opposition between --mag- and -um-marked processes in Tagalog, which Ramos (1974) interpreted
as marking ‘centrifugal’ versus ‘centripetal’ actions, i.e. actions exporting (16) or importing (17) done-
tos, or actions occurring outside of the agent (18) versus internally induced actions by an agent (19).

(16) nag-bili ang babae ng gulay (Martin 1996: 258)2

sold TM woman vegetables
‘The woman sold some vegetables’
(17) b-um-ili ang babae ng gulay
bought TM woman vegetables
‘The woman bought some vegetables’
(18) ang pari ‘y nag-bangon ng bago -ng bahay (Martin 1996: 259)
TM priest IM erected new LK house
‘The priest built a new house’
(19) Ako ‘y b-um-angon
I (Topic) IM got up
‘I got up’

Martin (1996: 292) ventures: “One way to generalize these … oppositions is to argue that action
clauses in Tagalog are based on two different types of clause nucleus, where the nucleus consists of a
Process and a Medium through which that process is actualized. One of these, the -um-type, is
basically implosive (or centripetal): It involves events in which the Medium either simply acts, or acts
on done-tos in such a way as to draw them into the nucleus. The other, the mag-type, is basically
explosive (or centrifugal …): It involves more volatile events in which the Medium acts in a way that
has repercussions for other participants”. He (1996: 294) concludes that “a functional grammar
whose terms are carefully motivated with as many reactances as possible does in fact lead, as Whorf
initially suggested, to an interpretation of languages as individuals”.

2
TM = Topic Marker (Martin 1996: 230); IM = inner motion; LK= linker (Martin 1996: 259).

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 While McGregor (1997: 99) holds that the transitive and ergative systems suffice to characterize
the experiential semantics of all languages, his approach differs from Halliday’s in one important
respect. He views only the roles associated with the most general voice relations as ‘emic’
distinctions, i.e. as “linguistically significant experiential signs” (1997: 114). The ‘micro-roles’
associated with distinct semantic types of situation clauses are in his view only etic, i.e. contextually
defined, semantic types. The emic transitive roles are Actor and Undergoer, to which he adds the
Affected, the animate participant affected in some way by the situation, for instance by receiving the
Undergoer (1997: 96). The Actor is the participant who enacts some action,event, behaviour, state or
cognitive process, irrespective of whether or not it is within their control. The Undergoer suffers the
action (or other type of State-of-Affairs), which is not within their control. The ergative roles are the
Agent, who directs action either onto another entity or onto themselves, and the Medium, who
materializes or actualizes the State-of-Affairs (1997: 98). Conceived of as a typological parameter, the
question is to which extent the two systems apply to individual languages. At one extreme are
languages in which the two systems apply throughout all clauses, which McGregor (1997: 99) argues
is the case in the Australian Aboriginal language Gooniyandi. Actor, Undergoer and Affected are
“cross-referenced in the verb by a pronominal prefix or enclitic” (1997: 97), and the ergative “Agent
is realized by an NP which may be marked by the ergative postposition -ngga, while the Medium is
realized by an unmarked NP” (1997: 98). Example (20) illustrates the nominal and verbal morphology
realizing the two sets of roles: the Actor is cross-referenced in the verb by the nominative
pronominal prefix l- 1sg, the Undergoer is cross-referenced by the accusative prefix –ø- 3sg, and the
Affected is cross-referenced by the oblique enclitic –nhi 3sg. The ergative Agent is marked by the
postposition –ngga.

(20) ngaarri nganyi -ngga doow -l +ø+a -nhi yoowooloo -yoo

money I -ERG get 1sgNOM+3sgACC+A -3sgOBL man -DAT
‘I got money from the man.’ (McGregor 1997: 97)

McGregor (1997: 99-100) further sets out his typological generalization of experiential clause
grammar as follows: “At the other extreme would be languages in which the two systems are
completely disjoint … I know of no such languages. In between these two extremes are two main
possibilities. First, it may be that all clauses are organized according to one system, and only some
according to the other. This is probably the case in English, where the transitive system appears to
apply to all situation clauses …, while the ergative system appears to be restricted to a proper subset.
… Second, it may be that some clause types are organized transitively, some ergatively, and that in
some the two intersect.”

4. Current contributions and research

Within recent and current contributions to experiential grammars, a difference can be made
between ‘core’ SFL work and more eclectic studies, which enter into dialogue with frameworks such
as Cognitive Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar and Construction Grammar to realize the aim of
‘unearthing’ a language’s experiential semantics from its distinct, language-specific reactances and
more overt coding.
From a core SFL perspective, there has been a stream of work on English from various SFL centres
such as the Sydney School (e.g. Hasan 1987, Halliday 1985, 1994, Halliday & Matthiessen 2004,
Matthiessen 2014) and the Cardiff School (Fawcett 1987, Tucker 1996). Core SFL work on languages

8
other than English was bundled in Caffarel, Martin & Matthiessen (2004). Quiroz’s (2013) recent
study of Chilean Spanish, like Martin’s (1996) study of Tagalog, picks up on Pike’s (1971: 76) idea that
participants and circumstances can be characterized in terms of a cline from nuclear to peripheral
relations in the clause as a whole. Her description of the participants in Chilean Spanish clause
grammar is based on their different agnates (Quiroz 2013: 199-218). The most central element,
Participant 1, is the one that involves person selection in the verbal group, and which may or may not
be overtly realized as a nominal group. It is also the most central participant interpersonally, in which
the speaker vests the responsibility for the truth of the proposition (Halliday 1985: 76). Participant 2,
the traditional second participant of a transitive configuration, is the element which can be cliticized
by an accusative pronominal element. Modal responsibility can be shifted to it in the passive.
Participant 3 is the element involved in ditransitive constructions. It is associated with dative
cliticization and cannot be assigned modal responsibility. The participant status of both Participant 2
and 3 is additionally signalled by clitic doubling, i.e. realization by both a nominal group and a clitic,
and adposition with pre-positional a, which, Quiroz (2013: 201)shows to be different from
prepositional phrases realizing more peripheral elements such as circumstances and attributes on
the basis of their different agnation patterns. Participants 2 and 3 are nuclear experiential elements,
which in their clitic realization are also part of the basic ‘negotiator’ unit of interpersonal structure.
Quiroz’s analysis shows how systematic configurational relations can be perceived in structure, and
process-participant-circumstance relations interpreted in terms of nuclearity.
More eclectic studies of subareas of English are Lemmens (1998), engaging in dialogue with
Cognitive Grammar, and Laffut (2006), who incorporates insights from the lexical-functional
approach, e.g. Levin (1993) and Pinker (1988). Further eclectic work includes contrastive work such
as the studies by Guerrero Medina (2002) and Lavid, Arhus & Zamorano Mansilla (2010) about
English and Spanish and Nordrum’s of Swedish, Norwegian and English. The added benefits of
contrastive and historical work will be discussed in Section 5. To further realize SFL’s project of
describing individual languages’ experiential grammars, which emerged in dialogue with linguists
such as Whorf, Gleason and Pike, some form of reconnection with like-minded theoreticians and
analysts on the current scene is, in my view, a necessity.

5. Main research methods

The description of the process types in Halliday (1985, 1994, & Matthiessen 2004) has been used
widely in such applications as critical discourse analysis and educational linguistics. Methods to take
this description further have received less attention. In this section I will discuss two research
methods that can contribute greatly to progress in the analysis of language specific experiential
grammars and that tie in with the strongly empirical turn linguistics has taken in the 21st century.
Firstly, it is essential to team up further with the neo-Firthian strain of corpus methodology,
pioneered by Sinclair in such works as Corpus, Concordance and Collocation (1991). Secondly,
essential new perspectives can come from psycholinguistic studies, which SFL traditionally has not
invested in.
In the realm of corpus-based study of experiential lexicogrammar, Tucker’s (1996) analysis of the
pattern not have the faintest/foggiest/ etc. idea was path-finding in many ways. Not only did it
propose a way of integrating Halliday’s ‘lexis as most delicate grammar’ and Sinclair’s ‘lexis-driven
grammar’, it also offered an SFL treatment of an issue that has since become a pet topic in
Construction Grammar, viz. the analysis of semi-productive idioms.

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 Stefanowitsch & Gries’s (2003) collostructional analysis is an important addition to corpus-based
heuristics for the semantic description of experiential constructions. Whereas collocational measures
quantify the degree to which lexical items are attracted to a lexical node, collostructional analysis
measures the degree to which lexical items are attracted to, or repelled by, particular slots of a
construction. Interestingly, Gries & Stefanowitsch (2004) immediately applied their method to
alternations such as the ditransitive versus the to-dative variant3. Their findings offer support for the
Construction Grammar position that each member of an alternation is a form-meaning pairing in its
own right, not only mapping onto different information structures, but also encoding different
general semantics. The ditransitive construction exemplified by (21) below, most strongly attracted
the verb give, followed by tell, offer, cost and teach, and the to-dative construction send and play
with take and pass as runners-up. The sets of the most strongly attracted collexemes are compatible
with the semantic distinctions assigned to the two constructions (e.g. Pinker 1989): the ditransitive
construction is said to mean ‘causing to receive’ for and the to-dative construction ‘causing
(accompanied) motion to‘, typically involving physical distance between the theme and the receiver.
However, Gries & Stefanowitsch (2004: 107) point out that “[t]he suggested constructional meanings
do not straightforwardly account for all differences between the two constructions”. Despite being
attracted to the to-dative construction, sell, supply and pay involve ‘causing to receive’ and read,
hand and feed typically do not entail physical distance. This shows the need for “a more refined
analysis of the two constructions’ semantics” (2004: 107), which tallies completely with the
collostructional analysis.
In its more extreme forms, Construction Grammar’s insistence that semantic generalizations are
associated with syntagmatic “surface patterns” very much challenges the assumption that
alternations are semantically revealing. For instance, Goldberg (2002: 329) holds that “relying on
explicit or implicit reference to a possible alternative paraphrase” in the analysis of argument
structure patterns “puts blinders on, and limits a theory’s ability to state the full extent of the
relevant generalizations”. Goldberg’s position entails that there is stronger semantic similarity
between syntagms whose surface form is similar, like (21) and (22), which are said to express ‘caused
motion’, than between alternates such as (21) and (23), which instantiate the locative alternation,
and (22) and (24), which instantiate the dative alternation.

(21) to-locative: spray the substance to all parts of the plant (WB)4
(22) to-dative: give the money to the poor (WB)
(23) with- locative: spray all parts of the plant with the substance (WB)
(24) ditransitive: give the poor the money (WB)

An interesting reply to this is Perek’s (2012) study “Alternation-based generalizations are stored in
the mental grammar: Evidence from a sorting task experiment”. Perek (2012: 604) explicitly
recognizes (as do the SFL and Lexical Functional traditions) that variants of an alternation differ
semantically. For instance, the to-locative “construes the event as an action by the agent on the
theme, causing it to move, whereas the with-variant construes it as an action affecting the location”.
However, it is the stronger claim that subjects sort semantic similarity between examples on the
basis of surface similarity rather than alternation that he wants to test. He set up a sorting

33
The collostructional analyses reported on in Gries & Stefanowitsch are based on the British component of the
International Corpus of English.
4
Examples followed by (WB) were extracted from WordbanksOnline.

10
experiment, in which he offered stimuli sets of ditransitives (22), to-datives (24), to-locatives (21),
and with-applicatives (23) to his subjects in the form of cards. He instructed his subjects to sort them
into the three groupings that best reflected the semantic similarities between the sentences as a
whole. Under Goldberg’s construction hypothesis, the to-dative and to-locative are expected to form
one group (the ‘caused motion’ construction), and the with-applicatives and ditransitives the other
two groups. Under the alternation-hypothesis, either a dative sorting (to-dative and ditransitive) or a
locative sorting (to-locative and with-applicative) are expected to come out as one group. Of the 26
subjects, 11 produced a locative sorting, 6 a dative sorting, and none a caused motion sorting.
Statistical processing of the results, viz. deviations scores and hierarchical clustering, further
confirmed that the subjects relied more strongly on alternation-based generalizations than on
surface structure-generalizations to detect semantic similarity. Perek concludes that it is reasonable
to assume that alternation-based generalizations are mentally stored, and that they involve “(i) a
constructional meaning abstracted from the meanings of the variants of the alternation, with (ii) an
underspecified form which contains only the commonalities between variants” (2012: 628).
In the current polemic surrounding agnation/alternation, it is necessary, I believe, to extend the
debate to external non-linguistic standards. Lucy (1992) made exactly this point in his reformulation
of Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis: to avoid the danger of circularity, one has to verify the
existence of correlations between linguistic structure and non-linguistic behaviour such as sorting
experiments. With its tradition of agnation-based generalizations in experiential grammar, SFL is
ideally placed to set up follow-up experiments, and contribute crucially to this debate.
Finally, in eclectic SFL-work on experiential clause grammar, contrastive and historical methods
can be seen to cast new light on questions of long standing, as I will illustrate with some studies of
spontaneous event marking. Guerrero Medina (2006) compares the semantic effects of sich and se
versus the use of intransitives to express ‘spontaneous events’ in German and Spanish. She notes
that sich and se may mark a specific lexical aspect meaning such as punctuality, as in die Tür öffnete
sich leicht (‘the door opened slightly’) and se durmió (‘s/he fell asleep’), which heightens their
transitivity in comparison with the non-marked intransitives in Hopper & Thompson’s (1980) terms.
When used with superventive intransitives, the Spanish clitic se is observed to code a number of
meanings that are not overtly coded in German, such as perfectivity, se murió (‘s/he died’), and
unintentionality, se cayó (‘s/he fell’). Adhering to the general methodology of ‘seeing language(s)
through multilingual corpora’ (Johansson 2007), Nordrum (2015) investigates Norwegian and
Swedish translations of English ergative intransitives from parallel corpora. Her aim is to gain more
insight into spontaneous-event marking in the two Scandinavian languages, which subsumes
reflexive marking, seg (N) / sig (S), morphological –s marking, diachronically related to the reflexive
but synchronically homonymous with the morphological passive, and (less commonly) the ergative
intransitive. She finds that, whereas in Norwegian the reflexive is the main marker of spontaneous
events, in Swedish, there is a division of labour between the –s marker and the reflexive: the former,
with its natural kinship to the passive, is the prototypical marker of spontaneous events, whereas the
latter requires ‘potent’ subjects, such as entities endowed with biological life, or organizations, which
can be interpreted as capable of self-instigation. One explanatory factor why the Norwegian –s
marker largely disappeared may be that its close neighbour, the s-passive, fossilized into a generic
passive. By contrast, the –s passive and the –s spontaneous event marker retained a wider
distribution in Swedish.
Lemmens (1998) reconstructs some historical changes in the verb-specific application of the
ergative alternation in English. The directionality of change is assumed to be generally towards

11
ergativization (Halliday 1985: 146), but Lemmens (1998: 191-219) also documents cases of de-
ergativization such as the verb abort. It came into English from Latin in the 16th century, depicting
spontaneous miscarriage. In metaphorical uses of this meaning it is clearly ergative, as shown by (25)
and (26), which adds a cause to the event of ‘aborting’:

(25) When peace came so near to the birth, how it abortived … (OED, 1692) (Lemmens 1998: 202)
(26) This is that which abortives the Perfection of the most glorious and useful Undertakings (OED,
1699) (Lemmens 1998: 202)

In Modern English, abort came to be construed as a transitive verb to express the meaning of
‘deliberately terminating a pregnancy’, as in to abort a child in (27). Its one-participant alternate, the
first clause of (27), is an ‘absolute’ transitive, whose overt participant, pregnant teen-agers, is
construed as intentionally targeting the action of termination onto the implied ‘their child’.

(27) Too many pregnant teen-agers are urged to take the “easy way” and abort, convinced by twisted
logic that it is kinder to abort than to bear a child and place it for adoption. (WSJ corpus) (Lemmens
1998: 210)

Contrastive and historical studies reveal language specific and diachronic differences in the
selection restrictions on participants and differences in voice and nuclearity in the construal of
process-participant-relations. In this way they alert us to the Hjelmslevian tenet that each language’s
content-form constructs a different content-substance (see Introduction).

6. Recommendations for practice

The challenge for SFL is to integrate empirical methods such as those discussed in Section 5 into its
own ‘grammatics’, its theory of description for experiential clause grammar. Some elements of its
long tradition in this area dovetail with current trends, such as the notion that the lexicogrammar in
its representational function is a unified resource and the emphasis on the meaning of the whole
construction. Others are currently controversial, such as the status of agnation-based semantic
generalizations. This suggests the need for more meta-descriptive reflection on all the formal
‘reactances’ to experiential clause meaning, their relation to overt coding, and the nature of the
semantic distinctions we can draw from them. To promote innovative work on experiential clause
grammar, it will be essential to develop and teach analytical methods and descriptive heuristics from
a specifically systemic functional perspective.

7. Future directions

SFL is very well placed to contribute, from its specific theoretical perspective, to many current trends
in the description of the representational semantics of clauses: fine-grained language specific
descriptions, comparative and diachronic studies and typological work. From its broad neo-Firthian
perspective, SFL can develop distinctive positions on topical issues such as:

- how can observations about lexical, i.e. collocational, syntagmatic structure be integrated with the
description of grammatical structure (cf. Tucker 1996)?

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- how can study of the lexical classes that are defined by attraction to elements of structure, both the
verbal element and its participants, contribute to insight into the semantics of a construction (cf.
Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003)?

All these areas constitute important challenges, which can allow SFL to contribute crucially to a more
precise understanding of the lexico-grammar in its representational function.

8. References

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Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of
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DeLancey, Scott. 1984. Notes on agentivity and causation. Studies in Language 8: 181-213.
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Stefanowitch, Anatol & Gries, Stefan. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and
constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8: 209-243.
Gries, Stefan and Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis. A corpus-based
perspective on ‘alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9: 97-129.
Guerrero Medina, Pilar. 2006. The grammatical expression of the spontaneous middle type in
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Linguistics: Proceedings of the 4th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference. Santiago de
Compostela September 2005. University of Santiago de Compostela. 343-353.
Goldberg, A. (2002) Surface generalizations: An alternative to alternations. Cognitive Linguistics 13:
327-356.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1961. Categories of the theory of grammar. WORD 17: 241-292.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1967a. Notes on transitivity and theme in English 1. Journal of Linguistics 3: 37-81.
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Halliday, M. A. K. 1968. Notes on transitivity and theme in English 3. Journal of Linguistics 4:179-215.
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Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1988. The grammarian's dream: lexis as delicate grammar. M.A.K. Halliday and R.
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Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. B.
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Hopper, Paul & Thompson, Sandra. 1980.Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse. Language 56: 251-
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Johansson, Stig. 2007. Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: on the Use of Corpora in Contrastive
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Lucy, John. 1992. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity
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a sorting task experiment. Cognitive Linguistics 23: 601-635.
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Principled Systemic-Functional Description based on Axial Argumentation. PhD thesis. Sydney:
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Tucker, Gordon. 1996. So grammarians haven’t the faintest idea: reconciling lexis-oriented and
grammar-oriented approaches to language. In R. Hasan, C. Cloran & D. Butt (eds) Functional
Descriptions. Theory in Practice. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 145- 178
van den Eynde, Karel. 1995. Methodological reflections on descriptive linguistics. Knud Togeby’s
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Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956) Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf. J. Carroll (ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

9. Further Reading

Butler, Chris. 2004. Chapter 8. Representing situations. In Structure and Function. A Guide to Three
Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 1. Approaches to the simplex clause. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 337 – 448.
Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, Christian. 1999. Construing Experience through Meaning: A
Language-based Approach to Cognition. London: Cassell.

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