Contribution à une étude des constructions antéposées du type : « En homme intelligent et humain, il partagea tout de suite l'inquiétude de Marcel » (J. Verne)

Abstract

This paper focuses on a set of Prepositional Phrases (PPs) governed by the preposition “en” and indicating an attitude, a behaviour pattern, a status or a more or less permanent property of a participant. We study in particular sentences where the PP is placed in initial detached position, a construction to which little attention has been paid until now, especially when based on corpus data. We show that the semantic scope of these constituents and the judgement they express vary significantly according to their position (at the head of the sentence versus after the verb). We insist finally on the frequently polyphonic dimension of the sentences in which these constituents appear.

Keywords

• detached constituents
• discourse framing
• polyphony
• Prepositional phrase
• semantic scope
• “en”