The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

136
(45) ha-tiyul le-hodu haya me’anyen
the-trip to-India was interesting
“The trip to India was interesting.”
(46) a. ?ha-tiyul hu le-hodu
the-trip he to-India
“The trip is to India.”
b. ha-yeladim be-hodu
the-children in-India
“The children are in India.”
In light of the above, Locative Ps are independent predicates. I will discuss them in
section 4.4. The status of The Directional P is different, and it is the subject matter of
the following discussion.
4.3.3 Syntactic realization
Unlike the Locative P, which defines a stative Location of an individual or an
event, the Directional P (to/from) describes a dynamic relation. More specifically, the
Directional P defines its complement (i.e. its internal argument slot, Int) as the
final/initial Location of an entity in motion. 32 In other words, the Directional PP is
predicated of an entity moving along a path. Therefore, in order to be interpreted, the
Directional PP has to combine with lexical heads (i.e. Ns and Vs) that have a path
meaning component. Thus, although the Directional P is a predicate (P R ), its
dependency on the selecting lexical head may suggest that it is not an independent
predicate, namely not a fully-fledged P R .
More specifically, I propose that the Directional P is unique in that its external
slot, rather than being an argument slot, forces combination with a path predicate. In the
spirit of Ackema (1995), I propose that the Directional P and the appropriate lexical
32 In Hebrew the complement of the Directional Goal P can be realized by a Locative PP or by a DP.
However, if the Directional P is le- (‘to’), rather than el (‘to’), only a DP complement is possible:
(i)
a. ha-kadur hitgalgel el/*le-mitaxat ha-mita
the-ball rolled to-under the-bed
b. ha-kadur hitgalgel el/le-rina
the-ball rolled to-Rina