Contenu du sommaire : Approches récentes de la préposition

This corpus-based paper compares the French preposition à travers ‘through' to its
Serbian equivalent kroz ‘through' in the expression of motion (e.g. Jean se promène à travers la forêt ‘John is walking through the forest'). We first show that the preposition à travers can be described by the notion of “guidance” which is conceived as a “family resemblance” that we propose to describe by seven semantic features : Dynamicity,Interiority, Unicity of the Ground, Opposition to motion, Lateral orientation, Minimal trajectory and Focus on the trajectory through the Ground. Next, we examine the validity ofthe concept of “guidance” for the Serbian preposition kroz which most frequently translates à travers. The comparison shows that while the features summed up above forà travers can also be used to analyze the spatial meaning of kroz, some of them are more salient in French, where as others are more salient in Serbian. So, it is the degree of salience of these features that is the main factor responsible for different distributions ofà travers and kroz in French and Serbian.

This paper deals with the analysis of endroit (‘place') considered through its combination withthe preposition à (‘at'). In its “dependent” use – explicit or implicit reference to an encompassing element –, this term denotes fixed entities in a frame of reference, to which aspace portion is sometimes associated (main ingredients of the notion of “location”).However, the semantics of endroit does not indicate the position of the entity denoted and its association with à requires further linguistic material to be added (the locating use of àselects “specified locations”). In its “autonomous” use, endroit identifies geographical locations and buildings rather than objects. Like common nouns of geographical locations, its combination with à needs to specify the localization of the location introduced. But thes pecification often entails a shift from the autonomous use to the dependent use, illustratingthe tenuous frontiers between them.

The paper investigates the use of manner verbs (e.g. marcher ‘to walk', courir ‘to run') withso-called locative prepositions (e.g. dans ‘in', sous ‘under') in the descriptions of motion in French, as in Il a couru dans le bureau ‘He ran in (to) the office', to explore the type of events such constructions express and the factors that influence their interpretation. Basedon an extensive corpus survey, the study shows that, contrary to the general claim according to which such constructions express typically motion in some location, they arealso frequently used to express change of location. The study discusses the interplay of various factors that contribute to the interpretation of these constructions, including semantic, as pectual and pragmatic factors.

The knowledge we have concerning the French word hors is limited to the work oflexicographers, who attempt to list all the meanings it can have. The diachronic study of horspresents its grammaticalization chain and the semantic evolution of its uses. Our synchronic study shows that hors can certainly be identified as a preposition (hors les murs - outside thewalls), but it can also be identified as a word 'formant' (un hors-d'œuvre), a locution (Il esthors jeu - He is offside), an adverb (Une fois hors, il sera repris par la brigade - Once outside,he will be recaptured by the squad) or a complex preposition (On se jeta hors des lits - Weburst out of the beds). Progress is made in the definition of the semantic identity of thisexpression thanks to a formal (distributional and syntactic) analysis. Thus, hors has atemporal meaning that indicates an end state ; it reveals a resulting state which succeeds to a presupposed initial state.

The issue addressed in this paper is the semantics of simple vs complex (or synthetic vsanalytic) expressions, in particular that of complex prepositions in Medieval French. We present the categorial structure of prepositions in Old and Middle French, and go on to show,on the basis of a corpus study of a few simple and complex prepositions, that the latter are indeed less polysemous than simple prepositions, as one could await, but nevertheless demonstrate a certain degree of polysemy. Their semantic evolution includes, for some, leapsacross conceptual domains – metaphorical transfers from space to time, for instance –, butit seems that it differs to a certain degree from that of simple prepositions, though this needs to be verified by further research.

The central aim of this paper is to study the interaction between the grammaticalization process by which prepositions may develop into prefixes, on the one hand, and French and Dutch word structure, on the other hand. More particularly, it will be investigated whether the degree of grammaticalization of a bound preposition is influenced by the category it introduces (verb, noun, adjective, adverb) and whether this influence is the same in Frenchand Dutch. These theoretical issues are applied to a specific case study : the French preposition entre ‘between' and its Dutch counter part tussen used as bound morphemes. Inthe first part, we show that the prepositions entre and tussen share a wide range of uses. In the second part, an extensive morphological, semantic and comparative analysis is applied tothe bound uses of both prepositions. The results of this analysis are discussed in part 3.