Smith and her followers assume that the imperfective markers in several languages can focus on the resultant stage of a situation depicted by a certain class of verbs and yield the so-called resultative reading. This paper tries to prove that the English imperfective marker is fundamentally different from, for example, the imperfective marker -te-iru in Japanese. The difference is that while the Japanese imperfective marker does focus on the resultant stage by triggering the resultant state reading, the English imperfective marker does not have such a function. In English, the seeming result meaning arises only from the causeÁeffect connection between the state depicted by the imperfective sentence and the situation which brings about that state. The imperfective marker has nothing to do with that meaning. This leads to the conclusion that the English imperfective aspect can focus only on the preliminary reading and the internal reading.

Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998 contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because () of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that the distinction between result verbs and manner verbs with their different event structure representation constitutes the important factor which dictates the possibility of the variation of argument realization, of which object deletion represents one instance. Responding to their claim, Goldberg 2001 presents the evidence () () which mainly concerns the object deletion of causative verbs which correspond to result verbs in English in order to show that the distinction is not substantial. The purpose of this paper is twofold. One is to present several pieces of evidence for Goldberg's contention based on the behavior of causative verbs with respect to object deletion. It is made evident that causative verbs in fact behave even freer than Goldberg's principle predicts. The other purpose is to examine some aspects of Goldberg's principle and demonstrate that it has wider applicability than originally intended, which eventually indicates that the principle comprises a part of a general set of conditions on the object deletion in English. The conclusion is that object deletion is not so much sensitive to the distinction between causative verbs and non-causative verbs as Rappaport Hovav and Levin claim it to be and therefore, object deletion fails to be a good diagnostic tool for the differentiation of the two verb classes. In other words, causativity is not a good parameter for the possibility of object deletion.

In this paper we deal with what Matsumoto (1996) calls Type I subjective motion expressions in English. According to Matsumoto they cannot occur with frequency adverbs and do not generally allow the progressive aspect. We show that his observation is not valid by presenting naturally occurring examples of the expressions which involve frequency adverbs and the progressive aspect respectively. Further we investigate how the frequency adverbs are allowed and what functions the progressive aspect has. For the frequency adverbs we propose a licensing condition employing the sense of iteration. It also turns out that the subjective motion implicit in the expressions makes a major contribution to the occurrence of the adverbs in a certain case. As to the progressive aspect we take up two cases, namely, its use in captions and in discourses describing courses/routes of particular paths and point out that in the former it conveys the speaker's or writer's higher degree of subjective perspective and in the latter it can be used to add a further explanation to a particular phase of the path described. Lastly, we discuss briefly the aspectual property of the expressions and its relation to the occurrence of frequency adverbs and the progressive aspect.