Nominalised Activities in Chinese History Texts: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective

This paper examines the nominal realisations of activities in Mandarin Chinese history texts from a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, focusing specifically on texts that recount historical activities. Drawing on a distinction between experiential metaphors (i.e. metaphorical realisations of figures) and activity entities, the study investigates how these two resources function within text-wide language patterns. The analysis is conducted from a metafunctional perspective, exploring how the two resources interact with textual, interpersonal, and ideational meanings in the text. The findings reveal that both resources exhibit important characteristics across metafunctions. Textually, they present and presume meanings similarly in higher-level Themes, but differently in troughs and higher-level News. Interpersonally, they interact differently with evaluative resources. Ideationally, they function similarly in their relation to figures and sequences of figures within the unfolding text. These findings contrast with their distinctive metafunctional orientations (textual vs. ideational) previously recognised from a grammatical perspective.