The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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b. (etmol) dan natan/ifšer (le-ovdav) lifto’ax bi-švita
(yesterday) Dan allowed (to-employees-his) to+open in-strike
“(Yesterday) Dan allowed his employees to start a strike.”
c. ha-xomer ha-ze lo noten *(la-bad) lehitkavec
the-substance the-that not let (to+the-fabric) to+shrink
“This substance does not let the fabric shrink.”
In (18b) the Dative argument ‘his employees’ is [+human], and therefore does not
force the ECM interpretation of natan (‘let’). Thus natan can be interpreted as
‘allowed’ which has two internal arguments: Goal (the Dative argument) and Theme
(CP). Given the omission of arbitrary Dative controllers, ‘his employees’, being the
(Dative) controller of PRO arb , can be omitted in (18b). The omission of the Dative
argument ‘the fabric’ is impossible in (18c), since being [-human], it forces the ECM
interpretation of noten (‘lets’). Under this interpretation of noten (‘lets’), ‘the fabric’ is
the (external) argument of the embedded verb lehitkavec (‘to shrink’), and therefore
cannot be omitted.
The second test is based on idiom chunks. DPs which are idiom chunk have no
independent reference, namely, they can be (quasi) arguments of the idiom’s predicate
only. Thus, we expect an idiom chunk to be possible with noten, if noten is an ECM
verb (19a), but impossible with ifšer which is a Control predicate (19b). This seems to
be correct (the underlined part is the idiomatic one):
(19) a. ?gil natan la-kvisa ha-meluxlexet lacet haxuca
Gil gave (let) to+the-laundry the-dirty to+get out
“Gil let the dirty laundry to get out.”
b. *gil ifšer la-kvisa ha-meluxlexet lacet haxuca
Gil allowed to+the-laundry the-dirty to+get out
“Gil allowed the dirty laundry to get out.”
The grammatical status of (19a) indicates that the nominal phrase (the idiom
chunk) la-kvisa ha-meluxlexet which follows natan receives its (quasi) theta-role not