INHERENT PARTICIPANTS AND ACTUALISED PARTICIPANTS
Most processes are accompanied by one or more inherent participants; the nature of the process determines how many and what kind of participants are involved. The material process represented by the verb fall for instance, has only one participant, whereas kick typically requires two: one participant is the Agent who carries out the action, and must be ‘animate’ and typically ‘human’; the other is the participant affected by the action of kicking, and is not required to be human, or even animate.
In the example Ted kicked the ball both the inherent participants are actualized as Ted and the ball. If we say Ted kicked hard, however, only one participant, the Agent, is actualized. The second participant, the one affected by the action, is unactualized but understood. In everyday uses of English, speakers frequently find it convenient not to actualize certain inherent participants. Give, for instance, is typically a three participant process as in Mary gave the Red Cross a donation. Only two participants are actualized, however, in Mary gave a donation and only one in Mary gave generously.
Certain participants are omitted in this way when they are conventionally understood from the context of culture or context of situation, for example:
The participant is not specific in electricity can kill, remarks like that can hurt, elephants never forget, Enjoy! and is perhaps not even known to the speaker in he teaches, she writes. Processes such as meet and kiss can be understood as having implicit reciprocity in, for instance, your sister and I have never met (each other).
Some processes have typically no participants; for example, statements about the weather, time and distance such as it’s snowing, it’s half past eleven, it’s a long walk to the beach. In these the pronoun it is merely a surface form required to realize the obligatory Subject element. It has no corresponding semantic function.
The term intransitive has been used to refer to verbs that express one participant processes such as fall or no-participant processes such as rain, whose action does not extend to any Object. The term transitive has been used to refer to verbs and clauses in which the process is extended to one or more Objects. Following this convention, give is transitive in Mary gave a donation but intransitive in Give generously!
Similarly, the semantic analysis into actualized and unactualized participants is paralleled by the syntactic analysis of verbs such as drive, eat etc. as being either transitive (taking an Object) or intransitive (with no Object).
We shall use ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ as syntactic terms, while referring semantically to one-, two- or three-participant processes, with ‘actualized’ or ‘unactualized’ inherent participants.
The number of participants (including the subject) involved in a process can also be referred to as its valency. A process with one participant is said to be monovalent – as in the ice melted. A process with two participants is bivalent – as in the postman rides a motorcycle; a process with three participants is trivalent – as in Mary gave the Red Cross a donation. The valency is reduced from three to two, or from two to one when participants are not actualized, as in the examples above.
To sum up, processes such as eat and drive each have two inherent participants (the one who eats or sees, and the one that is eaten or driven). But in our listed examples only one is actualized. The items in brackets represent the conventionally understood second participant. As regards valency, in each case the normal valency of two is reduced to one. As regards transitivity, each of the verbs is potentially transitive, but as the second participant is unactualized, the use is intransitive.
