ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the account of M.A.K. Halliday’s model of language as it is developed in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), referencing Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, revised by C.M.I.M. Matthiessen (2014). First, it introduces the five dimensions of language study (structure, system, stratification, instantiation, metafunction). Second, it describes a topic directly relevant to the study of narrative worlds (see Chapter 7): the meaning choices of process in the SFL system of ‘transitivity’. The three prototypical process choices are the material (meanings of happening/creating/doing), the mental (meanings of thinking/feeling/ seeing) and the relational (meanings of having attribute/having identity/symbolizing). Secondary meanings fall between the prototypical; most relevant to narrative study is the verbal process between the mental and relational choices. In Construing Experience Through Meaning (1999), Halliday and Matthiessen describe the ‘construal’ of experience through the meanings of language. Through understanding the prototypical process meanings, humans can construe the experience of a physical world of doing (from material processes), the experience of a world of consciousness of sensing (from mental processes) and the experience of a world of abstract relations of being (from relational processes).
