Identifying the transitivity roles of postverbal prepositional phrases : the participant/circumstance interface
Résumé
The objective of this chapter is to propose an analysis of the transitivity status of a selection of prepositional phrases (PrepP) in post-verbal position in modern French. Although PrepP are typically considered as circumstantial in systemic functional linguistics, the distinction between circumstances and participants is not, as Halliday himself has pointed out, a clear-cut one in all languages (1994: 150) and in French cannot be decided on a strictly formal basis. We will discuss different syntactic, semantic and informational criteria that can also have a bearing on the status of PrepP as either sentence participant or circumstance.
Domaines
Linguistique
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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