English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. The present paper argues that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predic ted by general principles of argument linking; the aspectual structure of the sentence is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the two subevents. At the same time that these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. The account serves to justify aspects of what we share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the "constructional" view. To the extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as evidence for this view as a whole. 1. A constructional view of grammar For fifteen years, the English resultative construction has been a focus of research on the syntaxsemantics interface. Each of us has made proposals about the resultative (Goldberg 1991; Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997a; Jackendoff 1990) proposals that share a certain family resemblance. The present paper is an attempt to consolidate what our approaches have in common and to add some new wrinkles to our common understanding. Our larger purpose is ...

This paper investigates two ways goals of motion events can be expressed in so-called ‘verb-framed’ languages (Talmy 2000), focusing on the Japanese postpositions -made and -ni. It is typically assumed that these postpositions are both goal-markers, but differ in exact goal semantics they encode, giving rise to non-overlapping distributions. Based on a range of distributional differences, I argue instead that they are more radically distinct that this:-made marks endpoints of event participants (including but not limited to paths of motion), while-ni is a dative case that marks goal arguments of motion verbs. This suggests that it is possible for two functionally distinct participant markers to converge and give the appearance of being alternate ways of realizing the ‘same ’ participant. Furthermore, adpositions such as-made, an inherently non-motion encoding resource co-opted for use in motion constructions, represent an understudied strategy for marking goals across languages, something that has ramifications for how motion typologies are constructed.