  Sally’s second sentence ‘She dropkicked the idea noisily off the cliff’ is a metaphor, so on Stern’s view, some syntactic phrase within that sentence should be read as falling within the scope of an ‘Mthat’ operator. Magidor (2017, 70) argues that Mthat must apply here to the entire verb phase (‘dropkicked the idea nosily off the nearest cliff’). But note that Stern requires Mthat to apply to meaningful  phrases,[18] so the entire verb phrase needs to be meaningful. Interestingly, however, once one has conceded that the verb phrase is literally meaningful, there is no reason not to take the entire sentence to be meaningful as well: the introduction of the subject term is entirely innocuous, and if there were any problem arising from category mistakes being meaningless it should have already arisen at  the stage where one talks of an idea being dropkicked off a  cliff.[19]