The paper investigates the emergence of verbs of success from more semantically concrete verbs and the role of six conceptual metaphors in this processes of semantic change originating from Proto-Indo-European. Based on a historical semantics theoretical perspective, the authors stress the importance of predicate and argument structures for lexical semantic developments. The research reveals a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European verb-class-specific argument structure (DAT-‘succeeds’) which is systematically mapped on the novel (and reconstructed) SUCCESS IS MOTION FORWARD conceptual mapping.