How the Participants in Mental Processes Involving the Verbs “Make,” “Take,” and “Have” Represent the Meaning of Clauses: Grammatical Metaphors in a Functional Grammar Study

Abstract

The transitivity system, in functional grammar, introduces seven processes. One of them is “Mental Process” that consists of three types: (1) affective, which represents feeling, liking, loving, and fearing, (2) cognitive, which represents the process of thinking, knowing, and understanding, and (3) perceptive, which involves the process of perceiving through the five senses such as seeing, and hearing. Participants engaged in the mental processes are Senser, someone who can sense, and Phenomenon, something that can be sensed. However, there is another participant, namely Range, when the mental process involves a grammatical metaphor. Grammatical metaphors occur in nominal groups that are paired with verbs that have no lexical meaning or are semantically empty, in this case, the verbs “make,” “take,” and “have.” This research aims analyse how the participants in the mental processes represent the meaning of the clauses when they are categorized as grammatical metaphors. The data source is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (2012-2017). This research shows that (1) the participants in the mental processes represent the meaning of clauses because they are categorized as grammatical metaphors, (2) because of grammatical metaphors, the participants in the mental process are the ranges, and (3) when the clauses do not involve the grammatical metaphors, the participants in the mental processes are the phenomenon, as commonly structured in the mental processes. Key words: Mental process, grammatical metaphor, congruent form, non-congruent form

Learning the Meaning of Song Lyrics through the Elements of Ideational Metafunction: A Case on Systemic Functional Linguistics

“…It is the entity that engages in the cognitive activity or has a particular mental state. The Phenomenon, on the other hand, refers to the object or content of the mental process (Ismail & Dahlia, 2024;Prasetyani et al, 2023). It is what the Senser experiences, perceives, or engages with in their mind.…”