Ce recueil de quatorze études est le premier à être exclusivement consacré aux prépositions complexes en français, appelées également locutions prépositionnelles ou prépositives, comme à travers, au bord de, en dépit de, par rapport à, à cause de, en ce qui concerne, etc. À la croisée du lexique et de la grammaire, cette sous-classe graduée aux contours flous, comportant des centaines de membres plus ou moins bien établis, soulève un grand nombre de problèmes descriptifs et suscite de multiples questions théoriques. L'ouvrage dresse un état des lieux inédit sur la question et ouvre de nouvelles perspectives pour la description de cette sous-classe de mots récalcitrante, à la lumière de nouveaux acquis théoriques, descriptifs et méthodologiques en sciences du langage. Il se caractérise également par une complémentarité des approches et des cadres théoriques, d'où un renouvèlement important de la problématique. Le volume s'organise en trois parties : la première regroupe six études théoriques de portée générale, la deuxième présente quatre contributions décrivant l'évolution diachronique des prépositions complexes, la troisième propose plusieurs études de cas.

While much attention has been devoted to simple nominal relators, especially prepositions and case markers, complex nominal relators have not yet been the focus of a systematic and cross-linguistic study. The chapters of this volume provide not only a working definition of such constructions, but also a description of complex adpositions and other complex nominal relators in a variety of European languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European, including some languages for which this phenomenon had received little attention, such as Breton and Albanian. Building on synchronic and diachronic corpus-based investigations, the authors show commonalities and specificities of these linguistic items across languages, trying to explain why and how they emerged. The research presented in this volume confirms the wide-spread use of complex adpositions in Europe, and the data reviewed in the final discussion suggests it might be the same in other parts of the world, as well. This book thus offers not only detailed descriptions of complex nominal relators in fifteen languages, but also indications of what to look for in other languages, and how to distinguish between a syntactically free sequence and a genuine complex nominal relator.

In The Evolution of Complex Spatial Expressions within the Romance Family, Thomas Hoelbeek offers a corpus-based historical study of a group of expressions in French and Italian. Applying a functional approach, he tackles adpositions containing the French noun travers or the Italian noun traverso, previously never analysed from a diachronic perspective. This study enriches our knowledge of the expressions analysed and their functioning in the past, but also in present-day French and Italian, providing diachronic observations regarding functional notions put to the test. Thomas Hoelbeek’s work also contributes to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation mechanisms of complex constructions, and shows that typologically related languages may evolve differently in their ways of representing space.

Word classes are linguistic categories serving as basis in the description of the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. While important publications are regularly devoted to their definition, identification, and classification, in the field of Romance linguistics we lack a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the current research. This Manual offers an updated and detailed discussion of all relevant aspects related to word classes in the Romance languages. In the first part, word classes are discussed from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The second part of the volume takes as its point of departure single word classes, described transversally in all the main Romance languages, while the third observes the relevant word classes from the point of view of specific Romance(-based) varieties. The fourth part explores Romance word classes at the interface of grammar and other fields of research. The Manual is intended as a reference work for all scholars and students interested in the description of both the standard, major Romance languages and the smaller, lesser described Romance(-based) varieties.