Les prépositions en contexte

This paper offers an enunciative approach to prepositions. The first section is about the general properties (§ 1-3) and possible definitions of prepositions (§ 1). The second section examines the nominal and referential status of prepositional complements (§ 2). The third section is about the inclusion of adverbial particles in the category of prepositions, and their general semantic, and aspectual properties (§ 3). The two main properties of prepositions are 1/ their function as relators (§ 1.2) – the prepositional relation represents a semantic facet of a referent (nominal phrase), a predicate, an event or a state of things (§ 4); 2/ the orientations of the prepositional function as a relator in A Prep B. B is structurally (syntactically) located relative to A (§ 5); Prep B is enunciatively dependent and located relative to the embedding situation of utterance (§ 5); A is semantically and referentially located relative to B (§ 6)