Moving on, we can now also step back and look at the bigger picture of the evolution of order — “cosmogenesis” — from this perspective.
We can see that this paper has been a tour of process types, but one that is cosmogenetically sequenced.
We were interested in ‘existent-existings’
so we began by looking at the two process types whose overlap gives rise to existential processes:
material (doing-&-happening) and relational (being-&-having) (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 171),
and found that material and relational gave rise to mental (senser-sensing).
Then we saw that the blending of mental with material yielded behavioural (senser-doing), and
that mental with behavioural yielded verbal (sayer-saying)
(which the topology places between mental and relational).
And this sequence, in which material and relational processes are experientially prior to mental processes, can be used as the grounds for adopting a particular epistemological position…