Abstract EN:

In the absence of specific studies relating to this subject, this work is intended to reconstruct the grammaticalization of nine French prepositions partly issued from participles (like durant, pendant, nonobstant, moyennant, excepté, hormis) and partly from adjectives or nouns (like malgré, sauf, plein), which were originally employed in ablative absolute (AA) constructions. A first section, devoted to the process ending point, illustrates how the nine prepositions behave in modem French as intra-clausal or as trans-clausal connectors, while a second section, focusing on the starting point, illustrates the different kinds of AA that are supposed to have originated the prepositional forms. In order to bridge the gap, a full, corpus-based reconstruction is proposed to show how a Ist order predicate originally employed in a binary construction such as AA has moved to 2nd order predicate status, or, to put it differently, from a free syntax environment to the invariable status of a grammatical item. The grammaticalization under focus is presented at the same time as a decategorialization process from a major category (verb, noun, adjective) to a minor category (préposition, conjunction, adverb) and as a conservative process exploiting both the original semantics of the predicate involved and the latent marginal syntactic function provided by the ablatival inflection. Since the prerogatives of ablatival inflection still seem to survive in some modem constructions which are able to express marginal functions without employing surface syntax, it is argued that synthesis, besides analysis, should have a right of citizenship in the description of the French language System.