The syntax of French à and de: an HPSG analysis

We present a descriptive overview of the uses of the French prepositional forms à and de and the properties of the constructions they appear in. The complexity of the data excludes a unified syntactic and/or semantic treatment, but significant subregularities can be identified. We show that uses of à and de can be grouped in two sets, one where they pattern with ordinary prepositions, and one where they seem to adopt the category of their complement. We show that this can be accounted for in an HPSG analysis which distinguishes ordinary heads from ‘weak’ heads. Finally, we provide an analysis of the portmanteau forms au, aux, du, and des, which are shown to obey an unusual combination of local and non-local restrictions