The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

12
To summarize, as it stands, Grimshaw’s functional approach to P proves
unsatisfactory in several respects. The weak aspects of the proposal, however, do not
bear on its major theoretical contribution to view P as a functional syntactic head,
despite the (‘semantic’) diversity among its members.
Indeed, in the past decade the functional view of P has gained independent
support from phonological and psycholinguistic studies (cf. Selkirk 1995 for the
former, Froud 2001 for the latter). P is argued to be functional also in the most recent
syntactic study (Baker 2003, Appendix). Putting aside the details of Baker’s approach
to P, it is worth pointing out that the line of argumentation and the supporting
evidence which leads to the classification of P as functional in Baker (2003) differs
substantially from Grimshaw (1991). Many of Baker’s arguments are based on crosslinguistic
empirical evidence, rather than on theory-internal assumptions. Thus,
Baker’s functional classification of P can be taken (at least) as an additional support
for the functional view of P. 14
To conclude this section: The lexical approach revealed the outstandingly wide
array of phenomena exhibited by P, but was unable to account for them. The nonuniform
approach introduced the option to classify (some) Ps as functional, paving the
way for the uniform functional approach. Although the latter has not been fully
successful, it is worth pursuing; the classification of P as functional seems to be the
key to understanding the wide range of roles performed by Ps and PPs.
The approaches to P reviewed above, undoubtedly, contributed enormously to
our understanding of this category. However, none of them succeeds in capturing the
whole picture. This is the challenge of the present study. In what follows I will outline
the goal, the major hypotheses and the structure of the study, concluding with a brief
statement regarding the theoretical framework within which it is conducted.
categorial identity of the complement per se which should be taken to reflect the difference. Rather, the
difference stems from a more general property of the complement (e.g. association with tense) (Siloni
1997 and references cited therein). (For a more detailed discussion of this point see chapter 2).
14 A coherent evaluation of Baker’s approach to P at this stage would be premature. The major goal of
Baker (2003) is to define the lexical categories N, V and A in a more explanatory way than they were
defined by the previous feature systems mentioned in fn. 2 (for details see Baker (2003)). A
comprehensive theory of P is not the main goal of Baker (2003). The approach to P he sketches in the
Appendix is, however, a very interesting and highly valuable bonus.