The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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the study). Thus, taking the notion ‘semantically contentful’ to refer to the property of
an individual preposition (e.g. be-, ‘in’), independently of its function, will eventually
lead to an inconsistency.
Based on (20)-(22), an additional observation can be made:
(24) The prepositions in (20) and (21) are phonologically smaller than those
in (22). The former instantiate P C or P pred (in addition to P R ). The latter
instantiate P R only.
The (alleged) descriptive correlation in (24) is reminiscent of the division of Ps
into small and big, sometimes found in the literature (see for instance Williams 1994,
where big prepositions are assumed to assign external and internal theta-roles,
whereas small Ps either lack an external theta-role, or do not assign any theta-roles). 28
The question arises as to whether this division is of any theoretical significance, and
therefore has to be reflected in the theory of P, beyond the statement in (24). Let me
show briefly that the answer to this question is negative.
Big Ps, which are always semantically contentful, instantiating P R , are only a
subset of semantically contentful prepositions; small Ps can realize P R as well (20a).
The phonological size of the small Ps, usually instantiating P C and P pred
functions, varies across languages, ranging from one vowel/consonant to a short
closed syllable, lacking a precise definition. Furthermore, nothing precludes a bigger
P-morpheme in a language from realizing P C (e.g. apo (‘from‘, ‘of’) in Modern
Greek, long (‘at’, ‘to’, ‘on’, etc.) in Bislama (Kurzon 2002)). 29
Note that the correlation between the small Ps and the variety of functions they
realize is not unique to P. The same is attested in other functional categories as well.
More specifically, phonologically small morphemes other than Ps tend to have a
greater functional diversity than bigger ones. Thus the Hebrew complementizer še
(‘that’) is a small morpheme, which realizes both a declarative C [-mod] heading an
argumental CP, and a relativizing C [+mod] which heads a predicative CP. In contrast,
ašer (‘that’), which is bigger, is a relativizer only. The definite small morpheme ha- is
both a (definiteness) feature of the nominal head (N) (Siloni 1994, 1997; Danon 1996,
28 Additional more picturesque labels such as ‘colorful’/’colorless’ and ‘dressed’/‘undressed’ are also
found in the literature (cf. Zribi-Hertz 1984, Marácz 1989).
29 Prepositions referred to as small also tend to be highly ambiguous.