AFFECTED SUBJECT OF INVOLUNTARY PROCESSES OF ‘HAPPENING’
Not all material processes involve a voluntary action carried out by an Agent. In situations expressed as Jordan slipped on the ice, the roof collapsed, the children have grown, the vase fell off the shelf, the participant, even when animate, is neither controlling nor initiating the action. This is proved by the inappropriateness of the question ‘What did X do?’ and of the wh-cleft test (*What the children did was grow). Rather, we should ask ‘What happened to X?’ The participant on which the action centres in such cases is, then, Affected. It is found in involuntary transitional processes such as grow and melt, which represent the passage from one state to another, and in involuntary actions and events such as fall, slip and collapse, which may have an animate or an inanimate participant.
In the following passage almost all the clauses are intransitive: the Subject participant varies from Force (the 11-metre-high tidal wave) to Affected (doors, windows, roofs, canopies, all inanimate).
The 11-metre-high tidal wave crashed over the beach restaurants and engulfed the people walking along the promenade. Doors swung open, windows shattered; roofs caved in and canopies tore apart.
