Relational processes are "those of being" (Halliday, 1994: 119) of two physical entities or of one physical entity and its feature or property. In relational clauses, there are two parts to the being: something is being said to "be" something else. In other words, a relation is being set up "to relate one fragment of experience to another: this is the same as that, this is a kind of the other"(Halliday, 1994: 107).
Relational processes fall into two distinct modes: attributive and identifying. Each of these operates with three main types: intensive, circumstantial and possessive. In the attributive mode, an entity has some quality ascribed or attributed to it. Structurally, we label this quality as the Attribute, and the entity to which it is ascribed is the Carrier. In the identifying mode, some thing has an identity assigned to it. What is meant is that one entity is being used to identify another. What is to be identified is labeled as the Identified, and what serves as the identity as the Identifier. The most important difference between the attributive mode and the identifying mode is that the identifying modes are reversible. Relational processes usually involve two participants and are normally incorporated in the sentence patterns of SVC and SVO. For example:
Attributive processes:
(1) Sarah is wise.
(2) The village is on the mountain.
(3) Peter has a piano.
Identifying processes:
(4) Tom is the leader. / The leader is Tom.
(5) Beijing is the capital of China. / The capital of China is Beijing.
(6) The piano is Peter's. / Peter's is the piano.
All these examples express the relation between two physical entities except (1), which expresses the relation between a physical entity and its attribute. They are all realized in SVC pattern except(3), which is realized in SVO pattern.
One point to be noticed is that some relational processes in Chinese do not contain a verb. That means the verb process itself is A Contrastive Study of Metaphorical Sentences in English and Chinese covert. For instance:
(7）她（V）很漂亮。
(8）这房子（V）真大。
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