Spray/load verbs can take a theme object (e.g., John sprayed paint onto the wall) or a goal object (e.g., John sprayed the wall with paint). I show that the syntactic status of these objects differs: theme objects can be subjects of unaccusative uses of spray/load verbs and referents of their entity nominalizations, but not goal objects (cf. Paint sprayed onto the wall, *The wall sprayed with paint and the spray (= the paint/≠ the wall). I argue that this behavior is explained under an analysis where the goal-object structure is derived by the conflation of a null preposition with the verb in English (cf. Damonte 2004). This move reduces the asymmetry between theme and goal objects to independent facts about the syntax of prepositions.