Blurb:

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.