Between spatial domain and grammatical meaning: The semantic content of English telic particles

Abstract The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that English spatial particles which have grammaticalised into telic aspectualisers are not devoid of the image schematic content, which motivates their use in specific contexts. Because aspectual meaning, including telicity, is compositional in nature, which means that it frequently results from the interaction of several linguistic features, it is vital to single out those predicates in which the telicity effect can be attributed solely to the particle, not any other elements of the construction. This can be implemented by adopting the scalar approach, which shows that telicity is entailed by the particle exclusively in a predicate containing an incremental theme verb. Accordingly, the incremental theme verb burn and its five telic particles (up, down, out, off and away) constitute the subject of investigation. The analysis demonstrates that each particle encodes telicity in terms of reaching the GOAL in the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema. Conceptual differences in encoding the termination of the burning process result from topological properties of the path construed by each particle under study.