Path expressions are canonically verb modifiers that indicate a path traversed by a moving participant of the event, e.g., She ran from the church to the railway station. A canonical path is conceptually dependent on the motion event, since the nature of the motion determines its spatial position and direction. However, there are less canonical uses of path expressions where they take on the function of a setting adverbial and constitute a starting point for the predication, i.e., the element from whose perspective the event is construed. The direction and location of such a path are based on the conceptualization strategy of the speaker. An English example is There was dense fog all the way from the church to the railway station, which indicates the presence of a substance (fog) at every conceivable point along a path between two locations (the church and the station). In this chapter I refer to such autonomous path expressions as path settings. In a Cognitive Grammar framework, I argue that path settings are reminiscent of more canonical, static settings, with the obvious difference that they are directional. Using data from Finnish, I discuss three grammatical phenomena that contribute to the conceived autonomy of path expressions: case marking of the verbal trajector (nominative vs. partitive), particles indicating terminativity (‘as far as’ / ‘all the way to/from’), and the use of path adpositions (with meanings such as ‘through’, ‘via’, ‘across’, etc.) as prepositions or postpositions, where prepositions are more compatible with the autonomous setting function than postpositions.