Book excerpt: This volume, originally published in Russian, combines data from a wide range of languages, meticulously analyzed, with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus capable of isolating the most important syntactic and semantic parameters and of drawing those generalizations that are most significant from a cross-linguistic perspective. Many ideas which are at best only hinted at in earlier literature – such as the precise relation among resultative, perfect, and stative, or correlations between resultative and passive voice – are here for the first time stated precisely and given a firm foundation by means of detailed exemplification from a wide range of languages.