Directional Locatives in Event Structure: Asymmetry between Goal and Source

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic differences between two types of directional locatives: (i) Goal locatives (e.g., into the house) and (ii) Source locatives (e.g., from the house). We identify their contrastive syntactic behavior in various constructions, and account for their asymmetry by assigning them two distinct underlying base positions. Furthermore, we argue that their systematic semantic differences are predicted by their different semantic scope in event structure. Directional locatives can be divided into the following three types: (i) Goal locatives, (ii) Source locatives, and (iii) symmetric Path locatives. ‘Goal’ and ‘Source’ have been well defined in the