[Approach to prostate cancer in men older than 75 years: active or passive?]

Based on the exponential aging of the population and the increasing life expectancy in industrialized western countries, prostate cancer (PCa) in elderly men is becoming a disease of increasing significance. Consensus exists that men over the age of 75 years should not be screened for PCa; however, higher age as a single parameter should not exclude men from being diagnosed with prostate cancer and treated accordingly. It is well-known that overdiagnosis and overtreatment are frequent in this age group. Competing mortality risks of men older than 75 years may supersede the risk of dying from PCa several fold. Both the treating physician and the patient himself should therefore balance the possible risks and benefits of diagnosing and treating prostate cancer concerning the impact on quality of life. This is of special importance when taking into account that the complication rates of curative treatment modalities are higher in older patients than in younger men and that hormonal treatment might have negative effects especially in older men.Age, existing comorbidities, cognitive and physical status in combination with specific tumor parameters are useful tools for an individualized treatment.Therapy should be considered for healthy, active men aged 75 years or older who present with high-risk PCa and/or with a PSA doubling time <12 months. Elderly men who are unfit or have low to intermediate risk PCa will most likely not benefit from treatment.

Cardiorenal End Points in a Trial of Aliskiren for Type 2 Diabetes

BACKGROUND: This study was undertaken to determine whether use of the direct renin inhibitor aliskiren would reduce cardiovascular and renal events in patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, or both. METHODS: In a double-blind fashion, we randomly assigned 8561 patients to aliskiren (300 mg daily) or placebo as an adjunct to an angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitor or an angiotensin-receptor blocker. The primary end point was a composite of the time to cardiovascular death or a first occurrence of cardiac arrest with resuscitation; nonfatal myocardial infarction; nonfatal stroke; unplanned hospitalization for heart failure; end-stage renal disease, death attributable to kidney failure, or the need for renal-replacement therapy with no dialysis or transplantation available or initiated; or doubling of the baseline serum creatinine level. RESULTS: The trial was stopped prematurely after the second interim efficacy analysis. After a median follow-up of 32.9 months, the primary end point had occurred in 783 patients (18.3%) assigned to aliskiren as compared with 732 (17.1%) assigned to placebo (hazard ratio, 1.08; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.98 to 1.20; P=0.12). Effects on secondary renal end points were similar. Systolic and diastolic blood pressures were lower with aliskiren (between-group differences, 1.3 and 0.6 mm Hg, respectively) and the mean reduction in the urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio was greater (between-group difference, 14 percentage points; 95% CI, 11 to 17). The proportion of patients with hyperkalemia (serum potassium level, ≥6 mmol per liter) was significantly higher in the aliskiren group than in the placebo group (11.2% vs. 7.2%), as was the proportion with reported hypotension (12.1% vs. 8.3%) (P<0.001 for both comparisons). CONCLUSIONS: The addition of aliskiren to standard therapy with renin-angiotensin system blockade in patients with type 2 diabetes who are at high risk for cardiovascular and renal events is not supported by these data and may even be harmful. (Funded by Novartis; ALTITUDE ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00549757.).

Aging and mental health in the decade ahead: What psychologists need to know

Until relatively recently, most psychologists have had limited professional involvement with older adults. With the baby boomers starting to turn 65 years old in 2011, sheer numbers of older adults will continue to increase. About 1 in 5 older adults has a mental disorder, such as dementia. Their needs for mental and behavioral health services are not now adequately met, and the decade ahead will require an approximate doubling of the current level of psychologists' time with older adults. Public policy in the coming decade will face tensions between cost containment and facilitation of integrated models of care. Most older adults who access mental health services do so in primary care settings, where interdisciplinary, collaborative models of care have been found to be quite effective. To meet the needs of the aging population, psychologists need to increase awareness of competencies for geropsychology practice and knowledge regarding dementia diagnosis, screening, and services. Opportunities for psychological practice are anticipated to grow in primary care, dementia and family caregiving services, decision-making-capacity evaluation, and end-of-life care. Aging is an aspect of diversity that can be integrated into psychology education across levels of training. Policy advocacy for geropsychology clinical services, education, and research remains critical. Psychologists have much to offer an aging society

Differentiation in Male and Female Speech Styles

From the moment of their birth, a person's life is determined by their sex. Ms. Goroshko wants to know why this difference is so striking, why society is so concerned to sustain it, and how it is able to persist even when certain national or behavioural stereotypes are erased between people. She is convinced of the existence of not only social, but biological differences between men and women, and set herself the task, in a manuscript totalling 126 pages, written in Ukrainian and including extensive illustrations, of analysing these distinctions as they are manifested in language. She points out that, even before 1900, certain stylistic differences between the ways that men and women speak had been noted. Since then it has become possible, for instance in the case of Japanese, to point to examples of male and female sub-languages. In general, one can single out the following characteristics. Males tend to write with less fluency, to refer to events in a verb-phrase, to be time-oriented, to involve themselves more in their references to events, to locate events in their personal sphere of activity, and to refer less to others. Therefore, concludes Ms Goroshko, the male is shown to be more active, more ego-involved in what he does, and less concerned about others. Women, in contrast, were more fluent, referred to events in a noun-phrase, were less time-oriented, tended to be less involved in their event-references, locate events within their interactive community and refer more to others. They spent much more time discussing personal and domestic subjects, relationship problems, family, health and reproductive matters, weight, food and clothing, men, and other women. As regards discourse strategies, Ms Goroshko notes the following. Men more often begin a conversation, they make more utterances, these utterances are longer, they make more assertions, speak less carefully, generally determine the topic of conversation, speak more impersonally, use more vulgar expressions, and use fewer diminutives and more imperatives. Women's speech strategies, apart from being the opposite of those enumerated above, also contain more euphemisms, polite forms, apologies, laughter and crying. All of the above leads Ms. Goroshko to conclude that the differences between male and female speech forms are more striking than the similarities. Furthermore she is convinced that the biological divergence between the sexes is what generates the verbal divergence, and that social factors can only intensify or diminish the differentiation in verbal behaviour established by the sex of a person. Bearing all this in mind, Ms Goroshko set out to construct a grammar of male and female styles of speaking within Russian. One of her most important research tools was a certain type of free association test. She took a list comprising twelve stimuli (to love, to have, to speak, to fuck, a man, a woman, a child, the sky, a prayer, green, beautiful) and gave it to a group of participants specially selected, according to a preliminary psychological testing, for the high levels of masculinity or femininity they displayed. Preliminary responses revealed that the female reactions were more diverse than the male ones, there were more sentences and word combinations in the female reactions, men gave more negative responses to the stimulus and sometimes didn't want to react at all, women reacted more to adjectives and men to nouns, and that, surprisingly, women coloured more negatively their reactions to the words man, to love and a child (Ms. Goroshko is inclined to attribute this to the present economic situation in Russia). Another test performed by Ms. Goroshko was the so-called "defective text" developed by A.A. Brudny. All participants were distributed with packets of complete sentences, which had been taken from a text and then mixed at random. The task was to reconstruct the original text. There were three types of test, the first descriptive, the second narrative, and the third logical. Ms. Goroshko created computer programmes to analyse the results. She found that none of the reconstructed texts was coincident with the original, differing both from the original text and amongst themselves and that there were many more disparities in the male than the female texts. In the descriptive and logical texts the differences manifested themselves more clearly in the male texts, and in the narrative texts in the female texts. The widest dispersal of values was observed at the outset, while the female text ending was practically coincident with the original (in contrast to the male ending). The greatest differences in text reconstruction for both males and females were registered in the middle of the texts. Women, Ms. Goroshko claims, were more sensitive to the semantic structure of the texts, since they assembled the narrative text much more accurately than the other two, while the men assembled more accurately the logical text. Texts written by women were assembled more accurately by women and texts by men by men. On the basis of computer analysis, Ms. Goroshko found that female speech was substantially more emotional. It was expressed by various means, hyperbole, metaphor, comparisons, epithets, ways of enumeration, and with the aid of interjections, rhetorical questions, exclamations. The level of literacy was higher for female speech, and there were fewer mistakes in grammar and spelling in female texts. The last stage of Ms Goroshko's research concerned the social stereotypes of beliefs about men and women in Russian society today. A large number of respondents were asked questions such as "What merits must a woman possess?", "What are male vices and virtues?", etc. After statistical manipulation, an image of modern man and woman, as it exists in the minds of modern Russian men and women, emerged. Ms. Goroshko believes that her findings are significant not only within the field of linguistics. She has already successfully worked on anonymous texts and been able to decide on the sex of the author and consequently believes that in the future her research may even be of benefit to forensic science.

Language Construction of Reality in the German Tabloid Press/on Materials of BILD Newspaper/

From the moment of their birth, a person's life is determined by their sex. Goroshko wanted to find out why this difference is so striking, why society is so determined to sustain it, and how it can persist even when certain national or behavioural stereotypes are erased. She believes there are both social and biological differences between men and women, and set out to analyse these distinctions as they are manifested in language. Certain general characteristics can be identified. Males tend to write with less fluency, to refer to events in a verb phrase, to be time-oriented, to involve themselves more in their references to events, to locate events in their personal sphere of activity, and to refer less to others. Goroshko therefore concludes that the male is more active, more ego-involved in what he does and less concerned about others. Women were more fluent, referred to events in a noun-phrase, were less time-oriented, tended to be less involved in their event references, located events within their interactive community, and referred more to others. They spent much more time discussing personal and domestic subjects, relationship problems, family, health and reproductive matters, weight, food and clothing, men, and other women. Computer analysis showed that female speech was substantially more emotional, using hyperbole, metaphor, comparisons, epithets, ways of enumeration, interjections, rhetorical questions and exclamations. The level of literacy was higher in female speech, and women made fewer grammatical and spelling mistakes in written texts. Goroshko believes that her findings have relevance beyond the linguistic field. When working on anonymous texts she has been able to decide on the sex of the author and so believes that her research may even be of benefit to forensic science.

The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

Sequential immunosuppressive therapy in progressive IgA nephropathy

BACKGROUNDS: Cyclophosphamide and high-dose steroids have been used as limited induction therapy in progressive IgA nephropathy (IgAN) to reduce the loss of renal function and proteinuria. We evaluated the effect of cyclophosphamide pulses (CyP) and mycophenolic acid (MPA) as sequential therapy on renal function in patients with progressive IgAN. METHODS: Twenty patients with progressive IgAN and advanced renal failure (median GFR 22 ml/min per 1.73 m2) and further disease activity (triangle downGFR -0.8 ml/min per month) after cyclophosphamide (CyP; n = 18) or steroid pulse therapy (n = 2) were treated with mycophenolate mofetil 1 g per day for a median of 27 months. RESULTS: The monthly loss of renal function was significantly reduced in linear regression analysis from -2.4 ml/min before CyP to -0.12 ml/min with CyP/MPA (p = 0.0009). Estimated renal survival time was significantly prolonged by a median of 65 months (p = 0.0014). Proteinuria decreased significantly from 1.7 to 0.4 g/l during MPA treatment (p = 0.015). In Cox regression analysis, only proteinuria >1.0 g/l was an independent risk factor for doubling of creatinine during CyP/MPA treatment (p = 0.03). CONCLUSION: A sequential therapy with CyP/MPA may arrest or slow down the loss of renal function and reduces proteinuria even in patients who passed the so called 'point of no return' with progressive IgAN.

Influence of body temperature on bacterial growth rates in experimental pneumococcal meningitis in rabbits

We examined the role of fever as a host defense in experimental pneumococcal meningitis in rabbits. Twelve hours after intracisternal inoculation of an encapsulated type 3 Streptococcus pneumoniae strain, body temperature was manipulated by using two different anesthetic drugs: pentobarbital, which did not affect temperature, and urethane, which mitigated the febrile response to infection. Growth rates of pneumococci in cerebrospinal fluid were dramatically influenced by modification of the febrile response. Rabbits whose fever was not suppressed had mean bacterial doubling times of 2.76 +/- 1.43 h. Animals with a blunted febrile response had a significantly faster mean bacterial growth rate (doubling time = 1.10 +/- 0.27 h; P less than 0.02). When the antipyretic effect of urethane was counteracted by raising the ambient temperature, animals also showed a marked reduction in pneumococcal growth rates. In vitro, the pneumococci grew well at 37 degrees C in Trypticase soy broth (doubling time = 0.61 +/- 0.05 h) and in pooled rabbit cerebrospinal fluid (doubling time = 0.85 +/- 0.07 h). However, at 41 degrees C neither medium supported growth. Thus, body temperature appears to be a critical determinant of pneumococcal growth rates in experimental meningitis, and fever could be a host defense in this disease.

Using PSA to guide timing of androgen deprivation in patients with T0-4 N0-2 M0 prostate cancer not suitable for local curative treatment (EORTC 30891)

OBJECTIVE: EORTC trial 30891 compared immediate versus deferred androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) in T0-4 N0-2 M0 prostate cancer (PCa). Many patients randomly assigned to deferred ADT did not require ADT because they died before becoming symptomatic. The question arises whether serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels may be used to decide when to initiate ADT in PCa not suitable for local curative treatment. METHODS: PSA data at baseline, PSA doubling time (PSADT) in patients receiving no ADT, and time to PSA relapse (>2 ng/ml) in patients whose PSA declined to <2 ng/ml within the first year after immediate ADT were analyzed in 939 eligible patients randomly assigned to immediate (n=468) or deferred ADT (n=471). RESULTS: In both arms, patients with a baseline PSA>50 ng/ml were at a>3.5-fold higher risk to die of PCa than patients with a baseline PSA12 mo. Time to PSA relapse after response to immediate ADT correlated significantly with baseline PSA, suggesting that baseline PSA may also reflect disease aggressiveness. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with a baseline PSA>50 ng/ml and/or a PSADT<12 mo were at increased risk to die from PCa and might have benefited from immediate ADT, whereas patients with a baseline PSA<50 ng/ml and a slow PSADT (>12 mo) were likely to die of causes unrelated to PCa, and thus could be spared the burden of immediate ADT.

In contrast to lung fibroblasts--no signs of senescence in skin fibroblasts of patients with emphysema

Smoking is known to be linked to skin ageing and there is evidence for premature senescence of parenchymal lung fibroblasts in emphysema. To reveal whether the emphysema-related changes in cellular phenotype extend beyond the lung, we compared the proliferation characteristics of lung and skin fibroblasts between patients with and without emphysema. Parenchymal lung fibroblasts and skin fibroblasts from the upper torso (thus limiting sun exposure bias) were obtained from patients without, or with mild, or with moderate to severe emphysema undergoing lung surgery. We analysed proliferation rate, population doublings (PD), staining for senescence-associated beta-galactosidase (beta-gal) and gene expression of IGFBP-3 and IGFBP-rP1. Population doubling time of lung fibroblasts differed between control, mild, and moderate to severe emphysema (median (IQR) 29.7(10.0), 33.4(6.1), 44.4(21.2) h; p=0.012) and staining for beta-gal was elevated in moderate to severe emphysema. Compared to control subjects, skin fibroblasts from patients with emphysema did not differ with respect to proliferation rate, PD and beta-gal staining, and showed a lower abundance of mRNA for IGFBP-3 and -rP1 (p<0.05, each). These results suggest that the induction of a senescent fibroblast phenotype by cigarette smoke, as observed in emphysema, primarily occurs in the lung.

The role of ocean transport in the uptake of anthropogenic CO2

We compare modeled oceanic carbon uptake in response to pulse CO2 emissions using a suite of global ocean models and Earth system models. In response to a CO2 pulse emission of 590 Pg C (corresponding to an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 278 to 556 ppm), the fraction of CO2 emitted that is absorbed by the ocean is: 37±8%, 56±10%, and 81±4% (model mean ±2σ ) in year 30, 100, and 1000 after the emission pulse, respectively. Modeled oceanic uptake of pulse CO2 on timescales from decades to about a century is strongly correlated with simulated present-day uptake of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and CO2 across all models, while the amount of pulse CO2 absorbed by the ocean from a century to a millennium is strongly correlated with modeled radiocarbon in the deep Southern and Pacific Ocean. However, restricting the analysis to models that are capable of reproducing observations within uncertainty, the correlation is generally much weaker. The rates of surface-to-deep ocean transport are determined for individual models from the instantaneous doubling CO2 simulations, and they are used to calculate oceanic CO2 uptake in response to pulse CO2 emissions of different sizes pulses of 1000 and 5000 Pg C. These results are compared with simulated oceanic uptake of CO2 by a number of models simulations with the coupling of climate-ocean carbon cycle and without it. This comparison demonstrates that the impact of different ocean transport rates across models on oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2 is of similar magnitude as that of climate-carbon cycle feedbacks in a single model, emphasizing the important role of ocean transport in the uptake of anthropogenic CO2.

The "bizarre" valency behaviour of Finnish verbs

The paper discusses two cases of valency alternations in Modern Finnish that to our knowledge have not attracted much attention. We discuss sentences (a) in which a verb which is normally used intransitively, i.e. without an object, is used transitively, i.e. with an object, and (b) in which a transitive verb appears with a new type of object.

Did John really promise Mary to leave?

This paper contrasts finite and non-finite complement constructions containing the matrix verb promise. Using data from the British National Corpus, I show that when no explicit mention is made of the promissee the non-finite form of complement is overwhelmingly preferred to its finite counterparts. The exact opposite is the case when the promissee is mentioned between the matrix verb and the complement clause. In addition, the promiser in the x promise y to infinitive construction is almost always pronominal. I suggest that these two facts, the dispreference for the to infinitive form of complement when the promissee is mentioned and the pronominal encoding of the promiser in such cases, are both related to the very rarity of this form of construction in English. Data is adduced showing that another rare construction, the so-called possessive -ing construction, also occurs with a disproportionate number of pronominal subjects. It is suggested that the preference for pronominal subjects in these constructions may be related to a wish to reduce the overall processing complexity of the predications in question.

Particle placement and the case for “allostructions”

As a reaction against derivational frameworks, Construction Grammar accords no place to regular alternations between two surface patterns. This paper argues for a more tolerant position towards alternations. With respect to the well-known placement variability of verbal particles (pick up the book / pick the book up), the author grants that there is little reason for analysing one ordering as underlying the other but goes on to show that it is equally problematic to claim that the two orderings code two different meanings (or serve two different functions) and therefore cannot be linked in the grammar as variants of a single category. The alternative offered here is to consider the two orderings as two “allostructions” of a more general transitive verb-particle construction underspecified for word order.

Manner of Obtainment as a relative in a family of resultative constructions

The present paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of a group of constructions which carry an idiomatic interpretation of obtainment. In Polish and German, the constructions under consideration consist of a verb with a directional particle followed by an object NP, as exemplified in (1a)-(1b). (1a) Adam wynurkował starego buta. (Polish) Adam wy- snorkeled old shoe. ‘Adam found an old shoe while snorkeling.’ (1b) Michael erboxte sich den Titel. (German) Michael er- boxed REFL the title. ‘Michael boxed his way to the (championship) title.’ Sentences containing these constructions will be assumed to have the same basic interpretation “Subject obtains/produces Object by V-ing”. A constructional analysis of the constructions will be proposed, as they pose licensing problems and their interpretation cannot be accounted for in terms of the individual conceptual structures of the lexical items composing the sentence. Unlike most accounts of verb particle constructions based on implicit or explicit assumptions of straightforward semantic composition, the present study proposes an analysis under which the semantic structure of verb particle combinations is not a compositional function of the verb and the particle/prefix alone. It is argued that the construction comes with its own subcategorization frame (separate from that carried by the verb) which is motivated by the meaning of the construction and its corresponding constructional subevent. Additionally, a crosslinguistic correlation will be shown to hold between a language’s ability to express event conflation (Talmy 1985, 2000) and the occurrence of some form of the construction in that language. This will be taken as an indication of the resultative nature of those types of directional phrases which involve the semantic interpretation of boundary crossing.