Agent In ‘Impinging’ Mental Clauses: Phenomenon

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 346-7):

[The please [‘impinging’] type of mental process] shares certain features of an effective material process: it occurs freely in the ‘receptive’ (I’m pleased with it), and it can be generalised as a kind of ‘doing to’ (What does it do to you? — It pleases me).  Here the Phenomenon shows some semblance to an Actor: from the ergative point of view, they are both Agent.