La préposition VERS en chinois

International audienceThis paper analyzes the syntactic behaviour of the prepositions TOWARDS and its contextuel variants in Chinese (Standard Mandarin: wǎng 往, xiàng 向, cháo 朝; Pekingese: wàng 望 (蓦), chòng 冲, bèn 奔, etc.). These variants are not fully synonymous in all contexts, contrary to what is reported in grammars and in dictionaries. We first propose to differentiate their linguistic behaviour to distinguish two TOWARDS: a [+dynamic] TOWARDS and a [-dynamic] TOWARDS. We also show that they react differently in their preverbal or postverbal position. We finally study in detail the nature of the objects they govern, which led us to identify other fundamental differences between them