Compound prepositions in Old French: “Reinforced” synonyms of their non-prefixed counterparts?
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Abstract
Certain pairs of prepositions in Old French, such as lez/delez ‘near’ and vers/devers ‘towards’ have often been considered to have essentially the same meaning (Gorog, 1972; Einhorn, 1974; Kibler, 1984). This study explores whether or not the compound forms of such prepositions are in fact reinforced synonyms of their non-prefixed counterparts or whether they show distinct semantic and syntactic patterns. Five prepositional pairs (fors/defors, lez/delez, sor/desor, soz/desoz and vers/devers) are analyzed using 1000 tokens drawn from the Nouveau corpus d’Amsterdam, the Textes de français ancien and the Base de français médiéval. The data are studied according to specific syntactic and semantic variables, including the type of determiner phrase (DP), whether or not the DP is modified, and whether the DP is animate or inanimate. While the data are characterized by a large amount of variation, there are definite tendencies across the five prepositional pairs, including that simple prepositions are more common before personal pronouns and animate DPs. There also seem to be colligational tendencies that are distinct to particular prepositions. Given the differences in syntactic distribution and the types of DPs selected, it seems that compound prepositions are not perfectly synonymous with their non-prefixed counterparts.
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