The interaction between word structure and grammaticalization. Evidence from word-formation with French entre- and Dutch tussen-
The central topic of this paper 1 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop `Approches récentes de la préposition' at the Université d'Artois (Arras, 30 March 2007). In completing this paper, I benefited from the comments of the participants of this meeting, as well as from the valuable suggestions of Ludo Melis, Kristin Blanpain, Antonine Cappaert and two anonymous referees. is the interaction between two forces: on the one hand, the grammaticalization process by which prepositions may develop into prefixes and, on the other hand, French and Dutch word structure. French compounds typically adopt the word order Head-Modifier (e.g. timbre-poste lit. `seal-post = stamp'), while Dutch usually manifests the inverse word order, i.e. Modifier-Head (e.g. postzegel lit. `post-seal = stamp'). It will be shown that these typological differences between French and Dutch word structure may have a strong impact on the grammaticalization of prepositions introducing P-V and P-N compounds. The theoretical assumptions are applied to a specific case study: the French preposition entre `between' and its Dutch counterpart tussen used as bound morphemes in P-V and P-N compounds.