Subjectifying Meaning: Behavioral Process as a Perspective of Construal in Transitivity

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In Systemic-functional grammar (SFG), the Transitivity system is a key ideational system in which changes in the world are construed into six manageable process types. Among them, the ontological status of behavioral processes (BPs) is challenged because of the high degree of grammatical indeterminacy between BPs and the adjacent three process types – material, mental and verbal processes. This issue can be tackled by retrieving the fundamental SFG premise that language is behavior in situations. Seen from this perspective, while the BP is the subject pole of the naturally evolved perception-action loop, i.e., construing experience from the angle of vision of physical changes indexical of mental states, the other process types constitute the object pole, i.e., construing experience as “thusness of change” in their respective realms of experience. Since the relationship between these two poles is topological, every change in the world is construed by lexico-grammar as both a percept and an action. We therefore argue that BPs’s ontological status can be consolidated only when the alternative theoretical perspective of “interworld” is added in the Transitivity model.