The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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(25) a. on našol konfet-u v karman-e
he found candy-Acc in pocket-Loc
“He found the/a candy in the pocket.”
b. on našol konfet-u na stol-e
he found candy-Acc on table-Loc
“He found the/a candy on the table.”
(26) a. on verit v Sach-u/etu teori-yu
he believes in Sacha-Acc/this theory-Acc
“He believes in Sacha/this theory.”
b. on pologayets y a na Sach-u/evo intu’ici-yu
he relies on Sacha-Acc/his intuition-Acc
“He relies on Sacha/his intuition.”
On the plausible assumption that Locative Case is indeed inherent, licensed by the
locative relation, its appearance in (25) is expected. The fact that Locative is not
assigned in PP-verb constructions (26) is accounted for, given the claim that their P is
not P R , but rather P C , which does not denote a (locative) relation, but just checks the
Case feature of the nominal. 24
(ii) As observed in Van Riemsdijk (1998) and mentioned in chapter 2, locative
Ps (in locative contexts) exhibit the so-called bottom-up dependency. More
specifically, the choice of a particular locative P is sometimes determined by its
nominal complement. Thus a picture may seem to be hanging in the air, when
actually it is hanging on the wall. The bottom-up dependency, illustrated for Hebrew
in (27), is absent when the same prepositions occur with PP-verbs (28):
(27) a. dan sam/maca et ha-sefer al/*be-šulxan
Dan put/found Acc the-book on/in-table
24 Despite the identical morphological manifestation, namely Accusative, the (structural) Case checking
by V [Acc] and by P C are not intended here to be identical procedures. The checking of the Case feature
of the nominal by P C is a purely formal procedure divorced from any thematic/semantic relation. This is
of course not true with respect to checking of Accusative by V [Acc] . The ability to check Accusative is
tightly connected to the theta-structure of a verb. Thus, although Accusative (and Nominative) is
widely assumed to be structural, it is certainly not dissociated from the thematic structure of the verb
(see Reinhart and Siloni 2003).