Contenu du sommaire : Enigmatiques prépositions

« Prepositions in French : an overview ». Prepositions have constituted a fundamental axis in linguistic research over the last twenty-five years, on the synchronic level as well as on the diachronic one, both in the field of the comparison between languages and in each language considered in itself, as in the case of French. However, the reference books which spread knowledge in the general public and thus allow its exploitation – for example in didactics or in automatic language treatment – still treat prepositions as marginal, and generally reproduce their old descriptions. The aim of this paper is to provide a clear synthetic overview of current studies on French prepositions, in order to make it accessible to a wider readership.

This contribution suggests a classification of French prepositions – à, après, avant, avec, chez, contre, dans, de, depuis, derrière, dès, devant, en, entre, envers, hors, jusque, par, parmi, pendant, pour, sans, selon, sous, sur, vers – according to the syntactical properties of their object (i.e. depending on the constituent they sub-categorize : noun phrase, prepositional phrase, sentence, infinitive, zero complement, adverb, adjective). These combinatorial properties allow to group, following the syntax, prepositions which would not spontaneously have been included following their semantics (chez, entre, envers, parmi, sous on one hand, avant, pour on the other hand), and to invalidate the semantic groupings usually performed (sur/sous, après/avant...). The observation of the distribution will throw light on this classification.

This contribution investigates the French prepositional system from two different angles. On the one hand, it considers the stereotypical environment of certain prepositions, on the other hand, it explores the most typical prepositional collocates of some nouns. Both types of studies are conducted on the basis of statistical, probabilistic analyses of a literary corpus (novels from the second half of the 20th century). Our method makes it possible to compare the combinatory profiles of a great number of prepositions. This, in turn, allows to establish sub-groups (clusters) of prepositions according to distributional criteria. We then study semantic interactions between some nouns of emotion and the prepositions that they can be governed by. The result of this interaction determines the behaviour of prepositional phrases from a syntactic point of view.

This work aims at improving the understanding of en preposition identity within the verbal complementation framework. We come in the continuity of the theoretical approach of Saussure and Harris, for whom language is an autonomous system whose semantic structure can't be defined through referential or conceptual intuition. We studied the structures N1 V en N2 and N0 V N1 en N2 through a large corpus, thanks to a software facilitating the sorting and classifying of the data. Syntactic tests allowed to list verbs admitting the prepositional group en N as a complement, and to classify them into three groups : those that establish N0 identity (Ses adieux consistèrent en trois baisers, La cylindrée s'exprime en centimètres cubes), those that suppose N0 (L'infirmière sembla gagner en absurde) or N1 (Lucienne me fournissait en chansons) modification and those that assume N0 or N1 transformation (La personne s'évanouirait en chimère). The property of the en preposition is to present en N as constituting and defining for the subject (or object) during the statement.

The reputation of “empty” prepositions such as à and de is based most notably on their behaviour, which is related to that of clitics (Vendryes 1921) or affixes (Miller 1992). From a semantic point of view, their empty, random nature is revealed in the fact that they can be interpreted in contradictory ways, for example in syntactical structures that are associated with transfer predicates. However, in the wake of Cadiot (1993) and Bartning (1996), the hypothesis concerning N1 de N2 constructions has been put forward that it is possible to discern “prototypical relations” when à or de is governed by a linguistic element (verb or adjective). The present study shows that the difference between à and de bears meaning and that the way in which they may or must be distributed relies on a semantic link between the linguistic element that governs the preposition and the preposition itself, following the principle of naturality, which indissolubly associates form and meaning. The difference emerges clearly in pairs where à and de are involved.

The paper considers verbal structures where the verb is followed by Prep ce que P and attempts to detect the differences between P que and Prep ce que P, using the same verb : je me réjouis qu'il soit venu /je me réjouis de ce qu'il a enfin réussi. Ce reproduces a structure that existed already in Old French, not necessarily with the same function or meaning. The use of either of these structures is related to the type of verb, the meaning of the preposition, and, most importantly, the construal (visée) of the verb. Ce is defined as an “introducer” and as a “cataphoric enunciator”, its function being to transform a preposition into a conjunction. The demonstrative features that enable the category change are pointed out as well.

This article explores the contribution of German linguistics to the study of prepositions. In recent research, three directions or approaches can be ascertained : (1) The generative approach, which regards prepositions as subordinating elements. (2) The grammaticalization approach, which analyzes how individual elements developed into a paradigm in the course of grammatical structuring. Grammaticalization is a process in which lexical elements become grammatical elements. (3) The semantics and usage approach, which explores how prepositions can express different nuances. As with other function words, the semantic role of prepositions is not always clear : one preposition can assume several functions, and one function can be fulfilled by different prepositions.