A Problem With Exercise 12 Discriminating Scope from Goal

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 141):

Pick out a Scope or a Goal in each of the following examples. See Section 3.4 (iv).

Blogger Comment:

To be clear, the clause demonstrating the Scope participant is metaphorical. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 237n) explain:

Such clauses are in fact mildly metaphorical variants of clauses where kick, punch, kiss, hug, etc. is a verb serving as the Process: he gave the dog a kick: he kicked the dog. This suggests that the nominalised verb is in fact a Scope rather than a Goal and that what might at first appear to be a Recipient is in fact construed as a Goal…

The authors' analysis is thus:

However, the problem here is the inconsistency between the Process (material) and the Scope: process (mental), due to the fact that the clause is a metaphorical variant of a mental clause:

which can be metaphorised as:

and resequenced, on the basis of 'give' transitivity, as:

Cf. He never gave a thought to the matter => He never gave the matter a thought