Title: A contrastive study of French and Dutch preverbs
Abstract: Words such as Fr. sur/ Du. op 'on, upon', Fr. entre/ Du. tussen 'between' and Fr. par/ Du. door 'through' can be considered matching pairs when they are used as prepositions: e.g. le livre sur la table/ het boek op de tafel ('the book on the table'). However, used as preverbs, the similarities seem to be much weaker: e.g. surestimer quelque chose/ iets overschatten ('to overestimate something'). On the basis of quantitative data resulting from our corpus research, we will investigate this phenomenon. At a morpho-syntactic level, on the one hand, we will show that French and Dutch preverbs appear in different types of constructions. At the semantic level, on the other hand, we will demonstrate that prepositions in preverbal use can develop new, often aspectual, meanings, but that this re-semanticisation process does not necessarily follow the same paths in French and Dutch.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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