ABSTRACT
What are the different types of process, as construed by the transitivity system in the grammar? The picture we derive from English is something like this. There is a basic difference, that we become aware of at a very early age (three to four months), between inner and outer experience: between what we experience as going on 'out there', in the world around us, and what we experience as going on inside ourselves, in the world of consciousness (including perception, emotion and imagination). The prototypical form of the 'outer' experience is that of actions and events: things happen, and people or other actors do things, or make them happen. The 'inner' experience is harder to sort out; but it is partly a kind of replay of the outer, recording it, reacting to it, reflecting on it, and partly a separate awareness of our states of being. The grammar sets up a discontinuity between these two: it distinguishes rather clearly between outer experience, the processes of the external world, and inner experience, the processes of consciousness. The grammatical categories are those of material process clauses (see Section 5.2, p. 179) and mental process clauses (see Section 5.3, p. 197), as illustrated by I'm having a shower and I don't want a shower. Text examples of these, and of other process types, are given in Table 5(1). For instance, you produce so much money is a 'material' clause, construing the outer experience of the creation of a commodity, but I was fascinated by it is a 'mental' one, construing the inner experience of an emotion. Or, to construct a contrastive pair, the machine is producing (sorting, destroying) money is 'material', whereas people love (hate, want) money is 'mental'.
