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Existential processes express the mere existence of an entity. There is only one participant in such syntactic structures, called the existent. The word ‘there’ has no specific meaning. Usually, a circumstance is involved.

In this section we have surveyed transitivity as a system that realizes the ideational function of language. The process types and the associated participant roles represent human experience of the world. The following figure (slightly adapted from Halliday 1994: 143) summarizes the correspondence between the meanings and the grammatical categories.