The Evolution of the French Preposition System

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The aim of this project is a diachronic study of the uses, semantics and discourse values of the French prepositions à, en, par, contre, dès, devant, entre, pour, sans, sur, sous, vers and dans from Old French to the present.The study, which will be instrumented and based on a statistical and distributional approach, will bear on the variations in the combinational behaviour of prepositions depending on date (diachronic evolution), genre and author. One area of special interest will be the detection of the highly specific combinations into which the prepositions enter. We will study the rise, reorganization and fall of fossilized prepositional structures. We expect to get an innovative view of diachronic evolution thanks to a model of analysis based on two sets of methodological procedures: (1) a study of the interdependence between the quantitative (uses of prepositions) and qualitative (values) dimensions, and (2) a study of the principles which have underlain the search for added semantic and discourse values in diachrony - a veritable driving force of language change. One of the requisites of the project - which will also be one of its major contributions - will be the construction of an annotated and lemmatized corpus spanning every stage of the history of French and balancing genres and text types. This corpus, set up jointly by the French and German teams, will be based partly on resources already available in Lyon (mediaeval era), Tours (16th century), Nancy (ATILF) and Cologne (modern French, 17th - 20th centuries). A proactive approach will be taken to give open access to as much of the corpus as possible.