Investigation and classification of psychological verbs under a systemic functional linguistics perspective through the short story “维克的好狗”

Abstract

Abstract: The research focuses on analyzing and classifying psychological process verbs in
Mandarin Chinese based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics by
Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The study uses the short story 《维克的好狗》, designed for HSK
level 4 learners, as the corpus to identify and categorize psychological verbs into four mental process
groups: perception, cognition, affection, and desideration. The results reveal that cognition and
affection verbs predominate while clarifying the grammatical and semantic features as well as the
linguistic expressions of each verb group. This research contributes to expanding the functionalsemantic approach in the study of psychological verbs in Mandarin, highlights the strengths and
limitations of applying the SFL framework to empirical data analysis, and proposes future research
directions to refine classification systems and enhance applications in modern Chinese language
teaching and learning.
Key words: Psychological verbs; systemic functional grammar; verb classification; Chinese;
short story.