Quand la routine s’installe

Abstract

The use of the preposition à ‘at’ involving ‘social routines’ gave rise to less attention than its locative use in the linguistic literature on space. In this paper, we highlight the main properties of this use of the preposition –‘functional’ expression of an activity or state, neutrality to number, possible lack of reference to a landmark/ground entity– by successively examining landmark nouns that refer to ‘objects’ and to ‘locations’. On this basis, we then sketch out the semantic mechanism which, according to us, seems to underlie this interpretation of the preposition à. Finally, we parallel this semantic functioning with that of bare singular nouns and incorporated nominals as recently described in the literature.