French Prepositions is an in-depth study of the forms of both simple and compound prepositions and their use in modern French. It is designed for use by teachers and students who wish to express themselves correctly in French and are looking for a complete and reliable reference book.

The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.

This book is the first to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The reader will benefit from a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks, among which, most notably, HPSG. The book is for researchers working in the fields of computational linguistics, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

The aim of the present bibliography is to provide a single and reasonably comprehensive list of books and articles which deal with problems related to prepositions in natural languages. If most of publications listed consider syntax or semantics, they also take into account morphological, stylistic, psycholinguistic or historical aspects.

Cet ouvrage réunit six études sur les prépositions et les postpositions à travers les langues. Ces formes posent des questions de type morphologique (s’agit-il de mots à part entière ou amalgamés ?), de type syntaxique (ont-ils leur propre régime ou sont-ils de simples marques de cas ?), et de type sémantique (sont-ils toujours polysémiques ? Peut-on parler de prépositions vides ?) Les prépositions et les postpositions « faibles », qui sont généralement les plus courtes et les plus fréquentes, sont analysées à l’aide de comparaisons de langues variées comme l’allemand, le coréen, l’espagnol ou le français. Prépositions et postpositions réunit des auteurs spécialistes de morphologie, de syntaxe et de sémantique.

This striking study of the meaning and use of the major spatial prepositions in French provides valuable insight into how the human mind organizes spatial relationships. Most previous analyses of spatial prepositions have assumed that their semantic properties can be adequately explained by familiar logical and geometrical concepts. Thus, the standard view of the preposition "in" as it appears in the sentence "the ball is in the bag" postulates that it refers to the geometrical relation of inclusion. This paradigm, however, falters when faced with the contrast in acceptability between sentences such as "the bulb is in the socket" and "the bottle is in the cap." The force exerted by the "landmark" (a conceptually fixed object) on the "target" (a moveable object) is crucial in this difference: the functional notion of containment seems more operational in the use of the preposition "in" than inclusion. That is, what are taken to be the landmark and the target depend greatly on the functions these objects serve in the human scheme. This offers important clues to otherwise problematic linguistic quirks, such as why one sleeps in one's bed, while one is said to lie on one's deathbed. While many of the examples apply in English as well as French, there are some noteworthy differences—in French one sits on a chair, but in a couch. Vandeloise convincingly argues that it is precisely this subjective element which makes a standard geometrical account unfeasible.