The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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3. The Phenomenon of Obligatory PPs
The topic of the chapter is two-place verbs whose internal argument is realized
obligatorily as a PP, rather than a DP (PP-verbs, henceforth). 1 The phenomenon is not
language-specific, as shown by the following examples:
English
(1) a. Dan relies *(on) Mira.
b. He believes *(in) love.
c. He looked *(at) the picture.
Hebrew
(2) a. dan somex *(al) mira
b. hu ma’amin *(be)-ahava
c. hu histakel *(ba)-tmuna
Russian
(3) a. Dan pologayetsa *(na) Miru
b. on verit *(v) lubov
c. on posmotrel *(na) kartinu
The Ps that occur with PP-verbs are phonetically small (e.g. on, in or at, rather
than under, near or above). The choice of the P-morpheme is rigid, one particular
preposition per verb, as shown in (4):
(4) a. Dan relies *in/on Mary.
b. He believes *at/*on/in love.
It is widely assumed that the internal argument of a PP-verb is not the PP, but
rather the DP complement of the P.
1 The study focuses on verbs which occur obligatorily with a PP. Thus (aspectual) alternations
involving PPs (i) and verbs such as worry (about), for which the occurrence of the PP is optional, are
outside its scope.
(i)
a. dan kara iton/ba-iton
Dan read newspaper/in+the-newspaper
b. dan axal marak/me-ha-marak
Dan ate soup/from-the-soup