Les prépositions complexes en occitan languedocien

Abstract

After listing, in the first part of this study, all complex prepositions instantiated in the Lengadocian subcorpus of the textbase BaTelÒc, we focus on structures of the type [Prep + Det + Noun + Prep] and apply a range of tests to these, in order to assess the degree to which they are fossilised. We further investigate cases in which word strings with the same base form differ in structure, and cases in which synonymous or near-synonymous word strings have different base forms. We conclude that the categorisation of prepositional expressions is only problematic for structures whose form is compositional but whose meaning can be either compositional or non-compositional.