La préposition en français et en espagnol : une question de grammaticalisation ?

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to compare prepositional phrases in French and Spanish which correspond either to an infinitival complement or to an oblique complement clause. The central empirical observation is that French basically uses two prepositions to introduce this type of complement, viz. à and de, whereas Spanish has a larger scale of prepositions that fulfill the same function, viz. a, de, рог, con, en. The claim is that grammaticalization theory, usually put forward to deal with historical data, can also account for comparative data as those discussed here, since French prepositions display several signs of a grammaticalization process, which their Spanish correspondants lack.