An Ah-Ha Moment

Here is the sentence:

I hid the gift in the closet.

When I was diagramming this sentence, I was baffled when I put "in the closet" under "hid" because it could be misinterpreted as: I hid in the closet. Therefore, I thought "in the closet" modified gifts instead. But I was wrong. I am documenting my thought process for the sake of fellow students of English grammar:

Here is what I considered:

There is an understood infinitive: I hid the gift (to be) in the closet.
There is an understood relative pronoun: I hid the gift (that is) in the closet.

My ah-ha moment came when I realized that "in the closet" could only mean "I hid in the closet" if "hid" was intransitive. Since it is a transitive verb, if the PP is understood as adverbial, it describes the action that is being done to the object.

For those of you scratching your head, here is the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs:
A transitive verb transfers the action of the verb from the subject to an object.
An intransitive verb does not transfer action from the subject to an object.

I hid -- intransitive, no direct object, an adverb would modify action done by the subject.
I hid the gift -- transitive, gift is the direct object, an adverb would modify action being done by the subject to the object.

Because the verb in the sentence is transitive, then "in the closet" does not tell where I hid, but where I did the hiding. I was in the closet when I hid the gift. That is, it describes not where I hid but where I hid the gift. That is not to say that "in the closet" could not modify gift, but you would need put it into a relative clause for the sake of clarity: I hid the gift that is in the closet.

So, what about this sentence:

I painted the chair in the corner.

Where I normally take a descriptive approach to grammar, I am going to be prescriptive here. If you want to be concise, you must write: I painted the chair that is in the corner.