Prepositions and Results in Italian and English: an Analysis from Event Decomposition

In this paper, we analyse the formation of goal of motion interpretation in English and Italian. We argue that contrary to what has been argued, both languages do form goal of motion interpretations although in a manner constrained by the principles of event structure composition. Parametric variation among the two languages will be driven by: (i) the nature of lexical prepositions available; (ii) the methods of syntactically licensing resultative projections. We extend the account to explain the absence of AP resultatives in Italian.