The English locative alternation relates sentences of the type John loaded hay onto thewagon to those of the type John loaded the wagon with hay. Some locative verbsoccur in both of these patterns, others in only one or the other. It is known that there aredifferences among languages with respect to which verbs are possible. The present researchfocuses on the constructional meaning of the locative alternation and on the constraints governingverbs that can participate in the alternation. One characteristic of the “ground-object” locative is that the object tends to be viewed as completelyaffected. This is known as the holism effect. Additionally, English has certain narrow constraintson the verbs that can occur in the two constructions. This study investigates whether nativespeakers of Korean learning English develop knowledge of the holism effect in the Englishlocative and knowledge of the narrow constraints. English native speakers and Korean learners ofEnglish participated in a forced-choice picture-description task. Native speakers of Korean alsojudged an equivalent test instrument in Korean. The primary results are these: When given aground-object structure, both learners and English native speakers preferentially chose aground-holism picture. We interpret this as a reflection of the holism effect: Learners, like nativespeakers, have knowledge of this aspect of the constructional meaning of the locative. Englishnative speakers also show their knowledge of the narrow conflation classes by rejectingground-object structures containing verbs that are not permitted in this structure, even if thepicture would be appropriate. Korean learners show no effect for narrow verb class. We interpretthis as showing that the learners have not achieved native-speaker knowledge of the narrowclasses. Korean uses a different basis for verb classification.