On directional readings of locative prepositions

This paper discusses data from English, Dutch, and German and argues that these languages have no spatial prepositions that are lexically ambiguous between a locative and a directional reading. Rather, prepositions like in, on, under or behind always denote places and any meaning of directionality has to be licensed by other means. These means include additional directional prepositions, resultative verbs, certain movement operations, case and/or contextual or reference axes that will be discussed in detail in the course of the paper.