The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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(5) a. dan higi’a axarey ha-mesiba
“Dan arrived after the party.”
b. dan higi’a axarey še ha-ša’on cilcel
Dan arrived after that the-clock rang
“Dan arrived after the clock rang.”
(6) a. dan natan et ha-sefer le-rina
Dan gave Acc the-book to-Rina
“Dan gave the book to Rina.”
b. dan hafax le-more/yafe
Dan turned to-teacher/beautiful
“Dan became a teacher/beautiful.”
(iii) As already mentioned, if Ps are classified as lexical heads, it means that PPs
are (theta-assigning) predicates, i.e. open expressions to be saturated by an argument
or by a subject (Williams 1980, 1989, 1994 for the former, Rothstein 1983, 2001 for
the latter). Consequently, they are expected to occur freely as across copula
predicates, similarly to other predicative phrases such as AP or NP (e.g. Dan is nice,
Dan is a teacher). However, they behave non-uniformly in this respect. Some PPs
fulfill the expectation (7a,b), whereas other fail to do so (7c,d,e):
(7) a. The book is in the drawer.
b. The story is about Bart.
c. *The destruction is of the city.
d. *The (public’s) belief is in John.
e. *The gift is to Homer.
In order to account for the confusing paradigm in (7) some Ps, referred to rather
informally as semantically contentful, were assumed to be two-place predicates,
assigning an internal and an external theta-roles (e.g. (7a,b)). Others were proposed to
be ‘grammaticalized’ in various degrees, namely: (i) having ‘less’ semantic content
(arguably, (7d,e)), and therefore assigning at most one (internal) theta-role, or (ii)
lacking any semantic content and therefore not theta-assigners (7c). As is already
clear from the examples in (7), there is a potential problem with this assumption. The