'En': from a preposition to its associated constructions

In our contribution, we use the principles that have been developed in the framework of construction grammars as a starting point to analyse constructions in which the complement of the preposition en depends on a verb [V (SN) N]. We distinguish three main interpretation types, localisation ( 2), the attribution of a state to an object or a subject ( 3) and the expression of a property ( 4), each of which is associated with one or several constructions. The aim of the three first sections will be to show that the meaning of the constructions under study goes beyond the meaning of the constituents that saturate the variables, although there still seems to be a kind of compositionality in each case. We will then look into the gerundive construction [en V-ant] ( 5) and we will show that it cannot be further analysed in modern French (it displays no compositionality and the meaning of en can no longer be independently identified). The gerundive construction thus cannot be integrated in the network of constructions studied before.