Abstract

This paper intends to provide a description of the four main continuative verbs in English, i.e. continue, keep, proceed and resume, in terms of the cognitive operations and pragmatic implications associated with some of their most common uses. Assuming that structural differences are the reflection of various conceptualisations of occurrences, the two main cognitive processes of metonymy and metaphor appear to interact with the prototypical semantic features of aspectual verbs and their complements, licensing or blocking some of the constructions in which these verbs occur. Metonymic and metaphoric mappings also appear to co-exist, thus producing conceptual complexes which eventually result in less canonical constructions.