An empirical investigation into the relationship between process type and situation type

Carr, Alex, Chrispin, Lucy and Fontaine, Lise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9366-8725 2026. An empirical investigation into the relationship between process type and situation type. Williams, Jamie, ed. Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Individual, Routledge Advances in Functional Linguistics, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 40-65. (10.4324/9781003342076-3)

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Abstract

Given the important place of verbs and their clausal configurations have in the grammars of human languages, it is no surprise that their categorisation has drawn the attention of linguists in different traditions. This chapter tests the links between two of these categorisation systems: the system of transitivity within Systemic Functional Linguistics and an alternative typology of Aktionsart or situation type that is more common in cognitive approaches to language study. Building upon preliminary work in the literature that have investigated the relationship between these two classificational systems, this study provides the first in-depth empirical testing of this link through the analysis of 1,000 clauses from the British National Corpus. The process and situation type of each instance was coded, allowing for quantitative relationships between the two classification schemes to be identified. The results show that there is a difference in the distribution of Aktionsart that are expressed by types of process, with some process types being associated strongly with some options within lexical aspect and more variation seen in others. The consequences of these findings not only point to the role that lexical aspect could have for process type identification, but also that this may bring greater insights into how process types reveal more about how individuals construe experience and the inherent temporal structure of an event expressed through verbs and their complements.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Global Humanities Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032378176
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2026 11:55
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/188686

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