Prepositions in French: An overview

Prepositions have constituted a fundamental axis in linguistic research over the last twenty-five years, on the synchronic level as well as on the diachronic one, both in the field of the comparison between languages and in each language considered in itself, as in the case of French. However, the reference books which spread knowledge in the general public and thus allow its exploitation - for example in didactics or in automatic language treatment still treat prepositions as marginal, and generally reproduce their old descriptions. The aim of this paper is to provide a clear synthetic overview of cur-cent studies on French prepositions, in order to make it accessible to a wider readership.