Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 293):
In this type, it is not the participants that are the expression of time, place or other circumstantial features, but the Process. In examples such as the following the verbs take up, span, cross, cause are so to speak ‘circumstantial’ verbs: US bases take up almost one-fifth of the land of the cramped island; more than 50 years span her age and mine; Turtle Ridge would span maybe three blocks; this situation is apparently caused by anomalous low temperatures; … Circumstantial verbs encode the circumstance of time, place, accompaniment, manner, etc as a relationship between the participants … This means that in terms of the concept of grammatical metaphor … all clauses of this type are metaphorical.