Shirley Carter-Thomas, Laure Sarda. Identifying the transitivity roles of postverbal prepositional phrases : the participant/circumstance interface. David Banks; Janet Ormrod. Nouvelles études sur la transitivité en français : une perspective systémique fonctionnelle, L’Harmattan, pp.113-138, 2016, 978-2-343-07120-6.

The objective of this chapter is to propose an analysis of the transitivity status of a selection of prepositional phrases (PrepP) in post-verbal position in modern French. Although PrepP are typically considered as circumstantial in systemic functional linguistics, the distinction between circumstances and participants is not, as Halliday himself has pointed out, a clear-cut one in all languages (1994: 150) and in French cannot be decided on a strictly formal basis. We will discuss different syntactic, semantic and informational criteria that can also have a bearing on the status of PrepP as either sentence participant or circumstance.