The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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sharp contrast to the core lexical heads, in these languages prepositions pied-pipe
obligatorily under wh-movement (e.g. al ma dan siper? ‘about what [did] Dan tell’?)
(Webelhuth 1992, Grosu 1994, Kayne 1994, Koopman 2000, Horvath 2001).
According to the criteria discussed so far, there is a full alignment between the
properties of P and the functional properties. This by itself is sufficient to maintain the
hypothesis that P is a functional category. To complete the picture, I turn now to the
more controversial property of P, labeled in (2) as head-complement relation.
2.1.3 Head-complement relation
The standard assumption in linguistic theory is that only lexical heads can assign
theta-roles. However, given a certain variety of prepositions (e.g. because, after,
under, above) referred to informally as semantically contentful (see chapter 1), and
certain contexts (e.g. locative), it is rather common to describe the relation between
prepositions and their complements as theta-assignment (cf. Emonds 1985). 19 The
classification of P as functional seems inconsistent with its alleged theta-assigning
ability. In what follows I will show that the inconsistency is only apparent, since even
when the relation between P and its complement is a predicate-argument relation, it is
not a theta-relation.
Note first that there are syntactic contexts (6) where theta-assignment clearly
does not seem to be appropriate to describe the P-complement relation (as will be
discussed in details in chapter 3). These contexts do not present a problem for my
hypothesis.
(6) a. Dan relied on Mary.
b. Marge believes in love.
Let us focus then only on the contexts where the discussed relation is often
assumed to be a theta-relation (e.g. locative PPs), illustrated below:
(7) a. Dan found a coin in/near the garden.
b. Lisa put the pen on/under the table.
19 I use the familiar notion ‘a semantically contentful P’ just as a convenient label for the present
discussion. In the approach to P developed here, semantic contentfulness does not refer to an inherent
property of individual Ps, but rather follows from the function of P (see 2.2.2).