Behavioural Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 136):

These can be interpreted as a subtype of material processes or as a borderline category between material and mental.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 514):

Here [in English] the grammar postulates a third type of process intermediate between these two [material and mental]: “behavioural” processes, in which inner events are externalised as bodily behaviour, like staring, thinking (in the sense of pondering) or crying.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 171):

On the borderline between ‘material’ and ‘mental’ are the behavioural processes: those that represent the outer manifestations of inner workings, the acting out of processes of consciousness and physiological states. 

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 248-50):

These are processes of (typically human) physiological and psychological behaviour, like breathing, coughing, smiling, dreaming and staring. They are the least distinct of all the six process types because they have no clearly defined characteristics of their own; rather they are partly like the material and partly like the mental.

 Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 250):

The usual unmarked present tense for behavioural processes is present in present, like the material … however, we also find the simple present in its unmarked sense (ie not meaning habitual) … which suggests an affiliation with a mental.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 250):

The participant who is ‘behaving’, labelled Behaver, is typically a conscious being, like the Senser; the Process is grammatically more like one of ‘doing’.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 255):

… ‘behavioural’ process clauses are not so much a distinct type of process, but rather a cluster of small subtypes blending the material and the mental into a continuum …