The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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(15) a. hu hafax mi-[ AP yafe] le-[ AP mexo’ar] (adapted from Emonds 1985)
he turned from-beautiful to-ugly
b. ha-sefer kaše li-[ NP kri’a] 12
the-book difficult to-reading
“The book is difficult to read.”
c. dan nika et ha-xeder bi-[ NP mhirut]
Dan cleaned Acc the-room in-quickness
“Dan cleaned the room quickly.”
Another problem for Grimshaw’s theory is presented by (temporal and locative)
adjunct PPs (12), repeated in (16a,b) (noted in Van Riemsdijk 1998). PPs are assumed
to be the functional extension of their argumental DP complement. Consequently, PPs
are predicted to be assigned a theta-role. However, an adjunct, by assumption, is a
constituent not assigned a theta-role. In the same vein, the occurrence of PPs as
(across copula) predicates (16c) does not follow in any trivial way from Grimshaw’s
proposal.
(16) a. Before the war, life was much better.
b. Bart found a coin in the garden.
c. The book is in the drawer.
Based on the above, it may seem that a functional approach to P is completely
untenable, or at least as problematic as the lexical one. However, it is important to
note that the major problem for Grimshaw’s theory regarding P is caused by an
arguably imprecise observation that functional categories have unique complements.
At the time when Grimshaw’s proposal was designed, this observation seemed to
many researchers as a linguistic fact, namely a universal property of human language,
to be accounted for by linguistic theory. Note, however, that if this is not so, the
problem raised by the distribution of Ps in (15), immediately disappears, and the
functional approach to P regains its appeal. 13
12 le- (‘to’) in (15b) and be- (‘in’) in (15c) become li- and bi-, respectively, as they are followed by a
consonantal cluster which has to be broken (i.e. the PP in (15c) is pronounced bim-hirut, rather than bemhirut).
This phonological rule is hardly obeyed in colloquial Hebrew.
13 Studies and consequent analyses of various constructions conducted in the past decade indicate that
the complements of functional heads such as C and D do differ substantially. However, it is not the