CONCEPTUALISING
EXPERIENCES EXPRESSED
AS SITUATION TYPES
PROCESSES, PARTICIPANTS, CIRCUMSTANCES
We will look at the clause as a grammatical means of encoding patterns of experience. A fundamental property of language is that it enables us to conceptualize and describe our experience, whether of the actions and events, people and things of the external world, or of the internal world of our thoughts, feelings and perceptions. This is done through transitivity, contemplated in a broad sense, which encompasses not only the verb but the semantic configuration of situation types.
The clause is, here too then, the most significant grammatical unit. It is the unit that enables us to organize the wealth of our experience, both semantically and syn tactically, into a manageable number of representational patterns or schemas. Our personal ‘construals’ of each individual situation are then selected from these patterns. In describing an event, for instance, we might say that it just happened, or that it was caused by someone’s deliberate intervention, or that it is unusual, or that we feel sad about it, among other possible construals. We will be talking about patterns of ‘doing’, ‘happening’, ‘experiencing’ and ‘being’ as the main types, together with a small number of subsidiary types.
As language-users, we are interested in events and especially in the human participants involved and the qualities we ascribe to them, what they do, say and feel, their possessions and the circumstances in which the event takes place. The semantic schema for a situation, therefore, consists potentially of the following components:
• the process (a technical term for the action (e.g. hit, run), state (e.g. have) or change of state (e.g. melt, freeze) involved.
• the participant(s) involved in the process (basically, who or what is doing what to whom);
• the attributes ascribed to participants; and
• the circumstances attendant on the process, in terms of time, place, manner, and so on.
