When In Means Into Towards an Understanding of Boundary-crossing In

This article examines the use of the preposition in as a marker of boundary-crossing motion in British English. While into is prototypically used to encode such dynamic motion events, there are recurrent contexts in which in marks the boundary-crossing path of the Figure entity instead. There is little comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon in the literature. This article identifies the conditions under which such a use of in is possible: these include when the Ground is conceptualized as a container for the Figure, when the verb encodes the semantic feature of path, or when the Ground is lexically encoded by the deictic pronouns here or there. Such underexplored, principled uses of in have import for how we understand the differences between in and into. This article shows that our understanding of the many uses of in is far from complete and that further work is necessary to understand the full potential of in as a marker of boundary-crossing motion.