Region Prepositions: The View from French

Abstract The goal of this article is to offer a formal account of region prepositions in French. We define region prepositions as prepositions that denote non-oriented locations and resist modification with measure phrases (e.g., au nez de in #dix metres au nez de l'avion ‘ten meters from (in front of) the tip of the airplane’). We show that region prepositions may involve items that include inflected markers or items involving “bare” markers (au bord de ‘at the edge of’ vs. à droite de ‘to the right of’). We analyze the relation between structure and semantic type to show that this distribution stems from the morpho-syntactic properties of their “internal location nouns” (e.g., nez, bord, droite, sommet). We offer a feature-driven analysis of these prepositions that hinges on a Lexical Syntax account and can capture all of the relevant data in a unified perspective. We conclude by discussing some theoretical consequences for accounts of spatial prepositions.