The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

c. *Dan i talked about him i
d. *Dan i believed in him i
e. *Dan i gave a prize to him i
Prepositional Case is standardly assumed to be inherent (cf. Chomsky 1986),
Case assigned to the argument of the Case-assigning predicate. This assumption is
reasonable for (6a,b), where the DP is the argument of a locative P, but not for (7),
where the DP introduced by P is clearly the argument of the corresponding verb or
noun (Chomsky 1981, Kayne 2001):
θ Agent
(7) a. Jean a fait manger la pomme à Marie.
John has made eat the apple to Mary
“John made Mary eat the apple.”
b. the destruction of the city…
θ Theme
In addition to the clear cases which indicate that prepositional Case is not always
inherent (7), there are also the more complex and intriguing ones (8):
(8) a. Dan relies on Mary.
b. Homer believes in nothing.
On the one hand, the nominal complement of P in (8) seems to be the argument
of the verb, rather than of P, suggesting that the Case assigned by the P in (8) is not
inherent, similar to (7). On the other hand, the verbs in (8) occur with PPs headed by
Ps such as on and in, rather than with the so-called ‘dummy’ of, which may be taken
to suggest otherwise. In other words, the thematic relation (or its absence) between P
and its complement in (8) is less clear than in (7). Consequently, the identity of Case
assigned in these constructions remains a mystery.
Given this, it is not surprising that in the past three decades the approaches to P
varied fundamentally. P was classified as uniformly lexical, forming a natural class