Material and Relational Transitivity in Mandarin Chinese (The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series)

By: Xiaokang Zhou

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Synopsis: This book presents a systemic-functional analysis of aspects of transitivity in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on two major types of clause: material clauses and relational clauses. Material clauses represent actions/events in the material world. Relational clauses express relationships between entities in the most general sense; they include as their prototypical members ‘being’ or ‘copula’ clauses. It demonstrates a brief account of the theoretical framework of SFG. The book also provides a detailed description of material clauses, to deal in turn with three major types of relational clause: attributive, locational, and possessive. One of the significant findings of the monograph is that relational clauses encompass a much larger portion of the grammar than is usually believed and include various ‘processes’ such as ‘giving’, ‘renting’, ‘putting’, in addition to ‘being’ (usually classified as material). Hence, the notion of transitivity has been refined.