A prepositional cycle in French
Fabienne Martin, Yining Nie, Artemis Alexiadou
November 2024 

This paper discusses the morphosyntax and semantics of locative prepositions in French, with a particular focus on the prefix de- in complex prepositions (e.g., en dessous de [in from.under of] ‘below’) and in axial nominalizations (e.g. le dessous de [the from.under of] ‘the bottom part/region of’). We propose that in these formations, de-, which developed historically from an ablative marker, retains a Path (Source) semantics and lexicalizes the function PROJECT, which defines the region outward from the axial part of an object (Matushansky & Zwarts, 2019). We support our analysis with a corpus study on French child data showing that children acquiring L1 French tend to overuse de- in transitive contexts, overtly expressing conceptual structure that is typically implicit in the standard adult language, but replicating patterns present in Old and Medieval French.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009008 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	under review
keywords:	locative prepositions, ablative-locative transfer, axial nominalizations, child french, semantics, morphology, syntax
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