Categorization of Experience of the World and Construction of Transitivity System of Chinese

Abstract

The main streams of Systemic Functional Linguistics present two distinct transitivity systems of English, which is attributed to their different views about the relationship between experience, meaning and the transitivity system. Particularly, they both take experience as the starting point, but adopt different upward approaches to the description of the experiential metafunction. Accordingly, existing studies of Chinese by reference to such English descriptions come up with divergent Chinese transitivity systems. Since it is prevailing practice to start the description of experiential metafunction from the end of experience rather than from the end of the transitivity system, a downward approach to do this is worth exploring. That is, the construction of the transitivity system presupposes a systematic categorization of experience and a natural relationship between experience and the transitivity system. Based on the basic level category theory, this article describes experience at three levels, and differentiates it into two modes – autonomous and influenced. Observing this account, and adhering to the mapping relationship between experience and the transitivity system, this article constructs a transitivity system of Chinese as consisting of processes at three levels along the delicate dimension, and elaborates on these at the basic level, since they are the most salient and essential to human beings.