Finishing this book was one of the most difficult things I have ever
done. It took far too long from original idea to page proofs and
suffered from being relegated to small corners of my life. It was very
rarely on the front burner. Since I started working on this topic in
1991, there has been a lot of interesting work done on the areas of the
articulation of VP, phrase structure mirroring event structure, the use
of functional categories to represent Aktionsart, and many other areas
that the research presented here touches on. The hardest thing about
doing a project of this size is to accept that not everyone's ideas can
be addressed and not all new research can be incorporated. The only way
that I have found it possible to let this book go to press is to reread
the Preface to Events in the Semantics of English by Terence Parsons
where he writes, ''The goal of this book is neither completeness nor
complete accuracy; it is to get some interesting proposals into the
public arena for others to criticize, develop, and build on. '' My aim
in this book is to make connections between various accounts of various
constructions in various languages at the risk of treating each of these
too lightly. I am grateful to too many people to thank them
individually.