Misrepresenting Verbal Processes As Mental

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 125):

Verbal or mental?

Note too that a small set of ‘verbal judgement’ verbs – see Section 3.7 (i) above – such as condone, criticise, excuse, applaud may also occur with an embedded fact clause: The press applauded the fact that no violence occurred; The press condoned the fact that some violence occurred. In these contexts, no Receiver is possible and such verbs are functioning as mental processes of emotion.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the crucial distinction between mental and verbal clauses is that mental clauses construe the Medium participant as a conscious thing, whereas a verbal clause construes it as a symbol source, conscious or otherwise. If these clauses were to be interpreted as 'mental: emotion', they would misconstrue non-conscious things, such as newspaper headlines, as experiencing emotions, as exemplified by:

Cf. genuine 'mental: emotion' clauses, which, unlike the above, are bi-directional:

Jim likes the fact that he was paid vs the fact that he was paid pleased Jim

Clearly, the purported impossibility of a Receiver is insufficient reason to classify such clauses as mental, and the clauses are verbal in every other respect: