CONCEPTUALISING
EXPERIENCES EXPRESSED
AS SITUATION TYPES
SUMMARY
1 Semantically, a clause represents a pattern of experience, conceptualized as a situation type.
2 Situation types comprise three main types: material, mental and relational. There are also three subsidiary types: behavioral, verbal and existential.
3 Each situation type consists of the following:
• The process: the central part of the situation, realized by a verb. Process types include those of doing, happening, experiencing, being and existing.
• Participant roles: these symbolically represent the persons, things and abstract entities involved in the process.
• Attributes: the elements which characterize, identify or locate the participant.
• Circumstances: those of time, place, manner, condition, etc. attendant on the situation.
4 The type of process determines the nature and number of the participants. Certain inherent participants can remain unactualized when understood in the context.
5 The valency of the verb specifies the number of inherent participants of any process, and by reduction indicates the result of unactualizing one or more participants. This type of analysis runs parallel to the traditional transitive-intransitive analysis.
