The syntax of French à and de: an HPSG analysis

We present a descriptive overview of the uses of the French prepositional forms à and de and the properties of the constructions they appear in. The complexity of the data argues against a unitary syntactic and/or semantic treatment, but the empirical facts can nevertheless be organized in a systematic fashion. Concentrating primarily on de, we show that its uses can be grouped into two classes, one in which de patterns with ordinary prepositions, and one in which it appears to reflect the syntactic category of its sister element. We show that these observations can be accounted for in an HPSG analysis that distinguishes ordinary heads from ‘weak’ heads.