On Material Eventualization

According to the six function types defined by systemic functional grammar and the“process function”(Process = Finite+ Event), the core element of the function is the event, so, if there exist six types of function(material and mental, verbal and behavioral, existential and relational), there exist six types of event(physical and psychological, verbal and behavioral, existential and relational). In a complex process, one event constitutes a state of affair or an eventuality of another event. This phenomenon is referred to as eventualization, which gives rise to two roles of the event in its actual linguistic use, i.e., process event and eventual event. For the research on the process, the event is the focus; for the research on the event, the combinatory relation between different events is the major concern. The present research concentrates on the combination of different material events, analyzes their differentiation and re-organization, and makes an empirical demonstration with linguistic data relevant to the event BEGIN taken from the British National Corpus. It aims to make a functional semantic exploration into the event as a whole.