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18-19 May 2015 Paris (France)
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Call for papersPredicative Prepositional Phrases: Syntax, Semantics, Lexicon Linguists generally agree that prepositions express a relationship between two elements, however there is less of a consensus with regards to the exact elements that enter into this relationship. On the one hand, most would agree that one of the elements is lexical -- a noun or similar category -- called the preposition's "complement." On this stable formal basis, there are copious works devoted to the complementation of thepreposition which attempt to identify semantic and pragmatic factors that determine the government of a particular preposition (among many others, Spang-Hanssen 1963, Schwarze 1981, Cervoni 1992, Berthonneau & Cadiot 1991, 1993, Vandeloise 1993, Kupferman 2001,Melis 2003, Leeman, 2008, etc.) On the other hand, the second element of the relationship, i.e. the element on which the PP depends, has inspired studies on various syntactic "functions" that prepositional phrases can assume. For example, the PP may depend on a noun (e.g., the conversation at the table, the guests at the table, the conversation in the garden or at the table), a verb (e.g., the guests are at the table, the guests remain at the table, the guests go to the table, the guests are or remain in the garden, the guests go to the garden), and even a sentence (the children must not play at the table or in the garden). In fact, the functional element is not always obvious. Thus, in some cases, one may wonder whether the PP is a locative complement or an attribute, (Eriksson 1980, Vandeloise 1986, Borillo 1998, etc.) In spite of differing "surface" structures, prepositional phrases often have in common a predicative function at some level of analysis, which can be stated either through paraphrase (the guests who are at the table, the guests who are in the garden) or by implication (the parents leave the children at the table or in the garden implies that the children are at the table or in the garden during the utterance, while the parents sent the children to the table or into the garden implies that the children are at the table or in the garden after the utterance). Furthermore, considering the number and variety of prepositions used in various languages, the topic will likewise interest linguists working in contrastive linguistics and language typology (cf. Hagège 1975, Lemaréchal 1989, Creissels 1995). The workshop will be a forum to debate and form a consensus on a particular type of PP, viz. those that appear in copular constructions that take on an attributive function such as Luc est en colère "Luke is angry," Luc est à la bourre "Luke is in a hurry," or Luc est dans l’embarras "Luke is in a quandary" (cf. Riegel 1985, De Gaulmyn & Rémi-Giraud 1991, Van Peteghem 1991). The post-copular position is an interesting place of convergence of different types of PP's, which have been extensively studied from a morpho-syntactic standpoint, especially with regards to their idiomatic nature in many languages, such as French (cf. Danlos 1980, 1988, M. Gross 1996, G. Gross 1996, etc.), English (cf. Machonis 1988), Portuguese (cf. Marques-Ranchhod 1988, Baptista 2000), Italian (cf. Vietri 1996), and Greek (cf. Moustaki 1990, etc.), as well as from a transformational perspective (cf. Negroni-Peyre 1978, Meunier 1981, etc.). But understanding their functional aspects is also a timely topic. Contributions on languages where prepositional phrases do not require a copula will be welcome as well. Presentations will address the following questions: (1) What are the different syntactic functions thatprepositional phrases may take? (attribute corresponding to a nominal complement, post-copular locative corresponding to a locative adverbial, etc.) The workshop will not exclude or favor any particular theoretical framework, but will emphasize studies relying on a solid empirical basis.
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