Ingressive and Egressive Verbs in English: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach to Meaning

This book offers a fine-grained analysis of the most common ingressive and egressive verbs in present-day English in terms of the semantic-pragmatic and cognitive factors responsible for their various structural representations. It draws upon the fundamental assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, according to which grammar is symbolic and conceptually motivated, and focuses in particular on the ability of these predicates to be integrated into constructions as a result of metonymic and metaphoric processes, which impose a well-defined set of constraints. The book supports its analysis and findings with examples both taken from three of the major corpora of English, namely BNC, COCA and GloWbe, and retrieved through ad hoc Internet searches. Although the literature on English aspectual verbs is vast, there are no studies of the language-external factors responsible for their different configurations. As such, this book fills this gap by offering linguists and students of linguistics a detailed investigation of this topic. It will also be of value to scholars with a more general interest in the linguistic evidence of cognitive activity in meaning construction.