Verb complementation and the French prepositions a and de

This paper is a diachronic corpus study of an alternation between two French constructions, [commencer/continuer a + infinitive](1) and [commencer/continuer de + infinitive](2). Our goal is to establish what determines the choice between the two. We propose two hypotheses, namely a phonetic one that the use of construction 2 is linked to an effect of hiatus avoidance and a semantic one that construction 1 appears preferentially in telic contexts. To test the predictive power of these hypotheses, we submit our corpus data to qualitative, lexicometric and statistical analyses. Our results confirm the validity of the phonetic hypothesis, which accounts for much of the variation in the data, but they provide only partial support for the semantic hypothesis, which only holds for certain historical periods.