Syntax of Pictures: A Survey of the Semantic Construal of Material Process

This paper makes a survey of descriptions by 20 Chinese subjects of a material process represented by a sketchy picture, adopting the cognitive approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The result shows that subjects' cognition/syntax is constrained by context, which is realized in different ways, but that there tends to be a predictable shared syntax for the definite theme of cognition.