This article discusses the question of how the meaning contribution of a dative is obtained. Despite the different formal instantiations that a dative can take, its semantics is typically very stable cross-linguistically. In particular, datives typically express goals of motion and experiencers; importantly, in experiencer contexts they are associated with a stative reading of the predicate, which in principle clashes with the goal semantics. In this chapter we argue that datives are semantically defined as initial boundaries, but specifically, when interpreted as experiencers, they are introduced by a prepositional layer that prevents the boundary semantics from extending to the whole predicate.