Participants and processes

Participants and
Processes

Francesca Helm,
University of Padova, Italy

 Different syntactic organisation can give more or
less emphasis to certain people and actions, or
even remove them completely.
 Sentences and clauses can be broken down into
the participants in the action, and the state or
action itself, that is processes, which are
expressed by a verb and may be qualified by
circumstances.
 The examination of how participants, processes
and circumstances interact, ie. “who does what
to whom (and how, why, when etc.)” is called
Transitivity

 In Halliday’s concept of transitivity there are three
components of what he calls a transitivity process:
 (i) the process itself
(ii) participants in the process
(iii) circumstances associated with the process
 The process is realized by a verbal group,
 the participant(s) by (a) nominal group(s) (although
there may be exceptions here), and
 the circumstance(s) by (an) adverbial group(s) or
prepositional phrase(s),

Transitivity

 Analyse the participants and processes in
the following and the different meanings:
 USA and Iraq at war
 USA invades Iraq
 Iraq is invaded
 USA at war

Participants
 These are the people or entities involved.
 Participants can be:
 the ‘doer’ of an action (agent, actor)
 the ‘experiencer’ or ‘senser’ of a state or
feeling
 the ‘sayer’ of something
 The ‘carrier’ of an attribute
 something/someone which is impacted on,
affected by, ‘done to’ or ‘receiver’ of an action

Agent or victim?
 When a participant is presented as active
in an event, as an actor or agent, they are
seen to be responsible in the event.
 When a participant has a more static or
passive role they can be seen as the
‘victim’ of an event

Processes
 Participants are linked by processes, which are realised
by verbs.
 Halliday identified 6 process types
 Material – processes of doing (work, arrest, erupt, climb, elect…)
 Relational – processes of being and having (be, have, stand …)
 Mental – processes of sensing and feeling (feel, think, wish,
believe …)
 Verbal – processes of saying (say, tell, report, write, command,
deny…)
 Behavioural – processes of human behaviour (sleep, cough,
look, listen…)
 Existential – processes which are signalled by there, such as
there is/there are

Transactive or non-transactive?
 In transactive processes – there is an
actor as well as someone/something
affeted by the action
 eg. Cook murdered six women
 Non-transactive processes – there is
nobody/nothing involved in or resulting
from the action
 eg. The car thieves fled

 Behavioural and existential processes
have only one participant each.
 The other processes may have two.
 We can also note that the second
participants of material and relational
processes may or may not be present.2

Identify the types of processes
 He was unrepentant
 He admitted making mistakes
 They sent the troops into Iraq
 He breathed deeply
 He does not have the integrity …
 He slipped quietly out
 He believed Saddam Hussein had weapons
 There were no weapons of mass destruction

Nominalisation
 Events or actions can be presented as participants
rather than as processes through nominalisation eg.
Destruction, creation, investigation
 Nominalisation involves the ‘loss’ of some semantic
elements of clause, notably tense, modality and often
participants
 Who destroyed? When?
 He witnessed tanks driven by the army destroy people’s homes
 He witnessed the destruction of people’s homes

Nominalisation
 Nominaliation is a resource for
generalizing and abstracting, which is
indispensable in science, for example, but
it can also obfuscate agency and
responsibility.
 (Fairclough 2003)

Why are participants and
processes important?
 Through analysis of transitivity we can
understand the evaluative slant of a story or
statement.
 People and regimes can be presented as actors
or as receivers of actions; in terms of their
qualities or of their mental processes or what
they say.
 This is how the ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the ‘innocent’ or
the ‘guilty’ are constructed

 The relationship between participants
(actor/do-er and receiver/victim) can be
further considered by looking at ‘voice’.
 Choice of active or passive voice leads to
different information being ‘fronted’ and
thus provides a different perspective or
interpretation of an event

Fronting
 The first part of a clause or sentence in
English is the most important part of the
message, therefore it is what
speakers/writers want to highlight that is
placed at the beginning of the clause.

Active voice

 The active voice, whereby the verb is preceded
by the subject and may be followed by an object,
focuses our attention on the actor and on the
process.
 Who or what was affected by the action is
secondary.
 The effect is to stress what is done and by
whom, the actor thus has full responsibility and
the receiver none, remaining a ‘passive’
participant in the event.

Passive voice
 The passive voice places the focus on the
receiver of an action or process and
backgrounds, and can remove the actor or
agent altogether.
 It is thus used when the agent is unknown
or redundant or, more importantly for
CDA, when there is a deliberate choice to
hide the actor or remove ‘blame’.

Why is voice important?
 The choice of voice has a direct effect on how
an event is presented. The choice of active or
passive affects who or what is emphasised in
sentence construction by being placed at the
beginning. It also affects a reader’s
interpretation. If the writer wants to distance an
agent/actor from a process the passive will be
used allowing deletion of the agent.

Participants and processes

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