The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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In both (18a) and (18b) the internal argument ha-kadur (‘the ball’) is represented on
the thematic tier. However, while in (18a) it is also represented on the Action tier as
the affected argument, in (18b) it does not appear on this tier at all. Given the contrast
between the action tiers of (18a) and (18b), it is plausible to translate ‘not fully
specified theta-role’ in Jackendoff’s proposal as non-appearance on the Action tier.
Note, however that non-occurrence on the Action tier does not distinguish
between locative PPs (e.g. Dan sits in the garden), and those in PP-verb constructions
(e.g. Dan believes in his garden). Further, given its lexical-semantics orientation,
Jackendoff’s approach is not designed to account for the Case issue, which I believe is
relevant for the phenomenon of PP-verbs. Therefore, I will not pursue this approach
further.
3.2.1.2 Semantic entailments: Dowty (1991) proposes to define the subject and
direct object theta-roles by Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient entailments. As noted by
Dowty himself, the verbs under discussion (i.e. PP-verbs) clearly do not fall under his
proposal since their object is not a direct one. Furthermore, the mapping to
subject/direct object is not absolute, but rather relative. More precisely, an argument
is mapped as a direct object/subject, not necessarily because it has all the Proto-
Patient/Agent entailments. Rather, for a given argument to be mapped onto a certain
position (subject/direct object), it is enough for this argument to have some
entailments appropriate for this position, if the other argument has less entailments of
this kind. Thus, even if Proto-Patient entailments are relevant to some extent to the
notion ‘not fully specified theta-role’ introduced in (16), they cannot be used to define
the internal argument of PP-verbs. Finally, similarly to Jackendoff (1990), the issue of
Case is not likely to play a role in Dowty’s approach, since it is semantically
orientated. Despite the fact that I will not adopt Dowty (1991) to account for the
phenomenon of PP-verbs, I will be using some of his insights where relevant.
3.2.1.3 The Theta System: Inspired by the phonological feature system that
underlies the composition of phonemes, Reinhart (1996, 2000, 2001, 2002) motivates
a system of formal features that compose theta-roles and define theta-selection.
Similarly to the phonological feature system, the value of a given feature can be
specified or non-specified. I will present the theta-features in the following
subsection. However, even before this, it can be seen that Reinhart’s proposal is very