13. RESULTANT STATES IN EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION* EVEV CLARK Stanford University, California, USA INTRODUCTION Children talk about changes of state from the earliest stages of first language acquisi- tion. These early utterances often appear as precursors to parts of fuller expressions of causation that include agents, actions, and objects affected. In this chapter, I review accounts how one- and two-year-olds talk about goals and resultant states, and describe some elicited production data from English and Hebrew in a task where children were asked to describe states that had resulted from a prior, inferred action. In many lan- guages, speakers use participial or adjectival forms of the verb to convey end-states; these provide a critical link in the causal chain, connecting instigators of actions that cause change to the outcomes of these actions for the objects affected. When children start to talk, they talk about a variety of objects and events. Among the event-types are those where an instigator performs an action on some object that produces a change in state in the object. This event-type then involves causation and change of state. (Vendler (1967) called the verbs for the actions in such events 'accomplishment verbs'.) The participants in such events are the instigator or agent of the causal action and the object-affected. The change observable is the change of state for the object-affected, from its initial state, prior to the action, to its final state *Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR97-31781), the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, and the Israeli-US Binational Science Foundation. I thank Caroline Cuevas for help with the English data collection. Address for correspondence: E.V. Clark, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA; email: eclark@psych.stanford.edu ·