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Exercise 6.1
Label the following examples for Process (verbal or mental) and Participant. Do not analyse
the internal structure of clauses which are themselves Participants (e.g. ‘That’s what Celia
says’).
1. A German researcher claims that the language of chickens has more than 30 different
phrases.
2. ‘That’s what Celia says,’ said Mrs Jennings.
3. You can believe what it suits you to believe.
4. You must reply, ‘I can’t divulge my sources.’
5. You must tell them no more than necessary.
6. This view can be criticized.
7. He smelled frying bacon and heard the chatter of women.
8. He said nothing, perhaps because he knew nothing.
Exercise 6.2
Label the following examples for Process (verbal or mental) and Participant. Label any
Circumstances simply as Cir.
1. Horse racing figures prominently throughout the first book.
2. One of the most famous modernist catchphrases has Victorian roots.
3. Richter was building on the island a reactor that would power the nation.
4. The wound was cleaned daily with sodium chloride 0.9%.
5. The victorious British general, Kitchener, had smashed his tomb of the defeated enemy.
6. Her husband, a photographer, was an imaginative man.
7. Soon she was breathing more steadily.
8. Ronson tended to march his men to the limit.
9. Stop whistling.
10. After a few months, the patient should take brisk walks daily.
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Exercise 6.3
a. (Partly open-ended.) What appears to be the same lexical item can instantiate different
functions. Identify the processes in the following instances involving the word smells,
adding any explanatory comments you feel necessary. Examples are from the British
National Corpus.
1. Your arrangement smells as good as it looks.
2. A courting stallion stays out of kicking range while he smells the mare cautiously.
3. Suddenly she smells cigarette smoke.
4. That cake smells burnt.
5. The air smells faintly of woodsmoke and apples.
6. So do our domestic dogs perceive smells with the same range of subtle ‘hues’ as we
perceive colour?
b. (Open-ended.) Try to find examples of different processes instantiated by the verb feels.
Exercise 6.4
Invent more congruent agnates for the following examples. You may have to invent relevant
Participants where these are not specified. Accept that you cannot convey exactly the same
message, but get as close as you can.
1. Some degree of suspicion and criticism often underlies the presentation of science in
newspapers.
2. One outcome of differences of reading pace can be a demand for restrictions on borrowing.
3. A common entry point for the discussion of character is the paying of particular attention
to their names.
4. And by [this term] is meant the non-reversibility of two narrative clauses without change
of the original semantic interpretation of the story.
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Exercise 6.5
Rewrite the following grammatically metaphorical nominal groups as more congruent full
clauses.
1. ... Wallace’s preference for a particular brand of cheese ...
2. ... questions about the likelihood of Shakespeare’s sole authorship of Richard II ...
3. ... Napoleon’s eventual post-Waterloo imprisonment on St Helena ...
4. ... the greedy-banker-induced collapse of the economy ...
5. ... Alan Lomax’s present investigation of the relationship between distribution of folk
music forms and the body behavioural styles that accompany them ...
Exercise 6.6
In each of the following two pairs of extracts, one is taken from the original text in a medical
research journal targeted at a specialist readership and the other is our attempt at a more
congruent re-write.
For each pair, identify the original text and comment on the linguistic differences.
1a. Difficulties in conducting opthalmologic examination of patients with dementia
have largely precluded careful evaluation of their retinal and optic-nerve functions.
1b. Because it is difficult for research scientists to examine the eyes of demented
patients, they have not often evaluated the way their retinas and optic nerves are
working.
2a. Out of a sample studied over six years and selected according to age, only 1.6
patients out of 1000 died of CHD*. Researchers estimate that if a similar proportion of
the whole cohort had died, only 560 people would have died instead of the 2258 who
actually died.
2b. If their six-year age-standardized CHD mortality rate of only 1.6 per 1000 had
prevailed for the whole cohort, the estimate is that CHD deaths would have numbered
560 instead of the total 2258.
*CHD = coronary heart disease
Source of originals: New England Journal of Medicine, 1986, cited in K. N. Nwogu, 1990: Discourse Variation
in Medical Texts. Aston University PhD thesis, published as Monographs in Systemic Linguistics Vol. 2:
Nottingham University (pp.140, 257).
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Important note
Circumstance is treated in a somewhat cursory manner in FAE Chapter 6. You are therefore
advised to read the online supplementary reading on Circumstance before attempting this
exercise, and, if you are more ambitious, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, fourth
edition, M.A.K. Halliday and M.I.M. Matthiessen, Routledge, 2013, Section 5.6.
Exercise 6.7
Pick out the Circumstances in the following examples and label them according to type:
either Extent, Location, Quality, etc., or, if you wish, more delicately: Extent: distance;
Extent: duration, etc. All examples have either one or two Circumstances.
1. Her great treacle-dark eyes surveyed Paul without any interest whatever.
2. Fittings should be completely removed for cleaning.
3. I speak as a wife and mother.
4. Trends towards early retirement are unlikely to be reversed despite shortages in some
industrial sectors.
5. The particle would have to travel faster than light for several kilometres.
6. Just take some tips from our testers, who’ve done the hard work for you.
7. There were several from the Gold Coast besides Nkrumah.
8. Her mum and dad had talked of nothing else for days.
9. He too was paddling like hell underneath.
10. Saturday nights we go to Kababish for a balti.
Exercise 6.8
You have probably noticed that whereas, in a simple clause, there is only one Subject, one
Finite, one Predicator, there may be more than one Complement and almost any number of
Adjuncts. Since Adjuncts are usually Circumstances, this obviously means that multiple
Circumstances are quite common in English clauses. Identify the Circumstances in the
following examples (which are not all single clauses) and label them.
1. He was supposed to be germinating a television programme for her, on her own topic,
about the conscience of an escaped East Berliner.
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2. These, although they must be travelling very fast initially, seem to move quite slowly,
twisting and turning lazily in the air and tracing out elegant parabolic paths as they fall
back to earth round the vent.
3. According to historians, the Tarascan kingdom developed considerably in Western Mexico
during this period while, in the Oaxaca valley, the Mixtecs expanded their territory further
by various means.