Cognitive Iconicity in Eventuality and Syntactic Structures in the English Language

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Events are analysed as temporal notions consisting of an onset, a nucleus and a coda along the lines suggested by Freed 1979 and Worst 1988. Crucial examples have been carefully examined and clarified in terms of event structures and the rusultative perspectives. The gradience of implication of a coda can be observed in three levels, lexical levels, verb phrase levels, and sentence structure levels. The fact that metonymical extensions observed in gerundive and derived nominals tend not to be a nucleus-to-onset type of extension but to be a nucleus-to-coda type of extension, is pointed out and explicated from the cognitive and embodiment points of view. Eventually these examples are subsumed under to a more wide perspective of metonymy. Various lexical extensions including denominal verbs, lexical-level variations (ex. say, babble, chatter, snarl, falter), and phrase-level variations (ex. make one's way to the door, pushing one' way to the door, laugh his way to the bank, murder his way to the top) should be explicated from the metonymic point of view, which safely leads to the conclusion that it is metonymy that plays a crucial role in the mechanism of lexical extension.