Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar - Convergence and Divergence - Gordon Tucker
14. An Alternative Model of the Transitivity System of Chinese
Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar - Convergence and Divergence - Gordon Tucker
He Wei [+]
Beijing Foreign Studies University
HE Wei is Professor of Linguistics, Deputy Director of the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, and Deputy Director of the National Research Centre for State Language Capacity at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is author of over 160 publications and 80 presentations, including papers published in Linguistics, Language Sciences, Functions of Language, Australian Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics and the Human Sciences, Functional Linguistics, etc. She is chair of China Association of Ecolinguistics, SFL representative of International Ecolinguistics Association and deputy chair of China Association of Discourse Analysis. She has served as co-editor, column editor, associate editor, editorial advisory board member, or guest reviewer for over twenty international and national journals. Her areas of expertise include SFL, ecolinguistics, translation studies, and discourse analysis. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between semantics and syntax from a functional point of view and in applying SFL to ecolinguistic studies.
Description
He’s chapter explores the transitivity system of Modern Chinese from a cognitive functional perspective and sets up a classification of Process Types and Participant Roles (PR) based on a corpus of a range of text types. Starting from an overall distinction between ‘autonomous’ experiences that occur of themselves and ‘influenced’ experiences brought about by other factors, it distinguishes the three major types of action, mental, and relational, with numerous subtypes within them. Each subtype is defined by the number of PRs, with the action type including a ‘no-role’ meteorological subtype, and then by the semantic nature of the PRs.