Développement de prépositions complexes induit par contact: un exemple de projection interlinguistique dans l'interface lexique-syntaxe

Constructions of the type [P (Det) N P], the so-called complex prepositions, have drawn much attention in recent studies. One of the reasons to explain this is to be found in the fact that no consensus has been reached on their classification as lexical or grammatical elements of language. This is an aspect which has been discussed by such linguists as Schwenter and Traugott (1995), Huddleston and Pullum (2002), Hoffmann (2004, 2005) and Fagard (2009), to name but a few. Another reason for the increased interest in complex prepositions is the fact that they are constructions that are attested in many European languages (Hüning 2014: 433). The interesting thing about the latter observation is that complex prepositions are not rooted in Proto-Indo European, but are relatively recent developments. The question hence arises as to how this type of construction came to be used within different subgroups of languages such as the Romance and Germanic languages. Another aspect that has been pointed by Bechet (2014) is the fact that some complex prepositions show a certain degree of identity in terms of form and/or meaning across languages. Cases in point are the English complex prepositions in place of and in spite of, which are attested in French as à la place de and en dépit de, but also in Dutch as in plaats van and ten spijt (van). On the basis of corpus evidence, it has been shown that both constructions are first attested in French, which lays the foundations for a contact-induced interpretation of parallel developments across French, English and Dutch. The purpose of this presentation is twofold. I will first determine the extent to which French has exerted influence on English and Dutch for the emergence and development of the abovementioned constructions. As a second step, I will propose a schematization of the emergence and development of these two complex prepositions in English and Dutch in an arborescent design on the basis of results from a corpus study by Bechet (2014). For such a representation, a conceptualization borrowed from Construction Grammar is proposed, namely the inheritance hierarchy (Goldberg 1995: Ch. 3, 2006: 13)