The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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chapter shows that they should be distinguished. Some of the distinctions have been
already mentioned (e.g. the binding facts in 4.1), and additional ones will be presented
below (and in section 4.3). It will be apparent from the following discussion that the
Hebrew Dative construction does not include a PP. This property of the Hebrew Dative
construction distinguishes it from the Directional one, but also from the Hebrew PPverb
constructions discussed in chapter 3. Recall also that in chapter 3 I focused on
Hebrew PP-verbs that occur with the prepositions be- (’in’) and al (‘on’). The majority
of these verbs assign an internal [-c] cluster (Goal), similarly to the ditransitive Dative
verbs discussed in this chapter. But while in PP-verb constructions the interpretation of
this theta-role varies, depending on the verb, in the Dative construction it is interpreted
invariably as a Recipient. 7
Thus, let me first provide more evidence that the Dative le- in Hebrew is indeed a
purely Case related P (P C ).
4.2.1 The Dative le- is P C
The P-morpheme le- (‘to’) in Hebrew is highly ambiguous (Berman 1982). Only
the Dative le- is argued here to realize P C , rather than P R . In this respect, note that unlike
the Directional le-, for instance, which is paraphrasable by a (semantically) more
specific preposition el, the Dative le- has no synonym. 8 On the assumption that the
Directional le- is a predicate, whereas the Dative one is not, it is not surprising that the
former has a synonym, but the latter does not.
Further, consider the following data, featuring the Dative le- (‘to’) in the causative
construction headed by natan (lit. ‘gave’, here, ‘let’): 9
(16) natati le-rina lenace’ax
I+gave to-Rina to+win
“I let Rina win.”
7 See Marelj (2002) and Ten Have, Schippers, Van Steenbergen and Vlasveld (2003), where the Recipient
interpretation of [-c] in the Dative construction is argued to result from interpreting the unspecified /m as
/+m.
8 Another example is presented by the Benefactive le- (e.g. hexanti et ze le-/bišvil lisa, ‘[I] prepared this
to/for Lisa’), which is paraphrasable by bišvil (‘for’) (Berman 1982). For an enlightening study of three
kinds of Dative le-, possessive, reflexive and ethical, see Borer and Grodzinsky 1986.
9 This construction is reminiscent of the causative constructions in French and Italian, discussed and
analyzed in Kayne (2001).