This article takes a broad look at the morphological, syntactic and semantic features of orphan prepositions in French, i.e. those used without a clearly expressed regime. The traditional subcategorization of prepositions does not always take into account the diversity of constructional patterns in which this distributional class, wrongly considered as simple, is embedded. The classification criteria are essentially semantic. Thus, prepositions are described as spatial, temporal, full or empty, lexical or f unctional, colored or colorless. However, the semantic interpretation is based on the description of the syntactic structure which often brings nuances to the meaning. The analysis of the syntactic behavior of certain prepositions and the recognition of the existence of null objects have led to the consideration of the distinction of the subcategory of orphan prepositions whose properties must be described through the variety of construction patterns, the nature and the functioning of the connected entities . The concerns in the present reflection relate to the linguistic foundations of the analyses made of them, the existence of specific rules in their construction, the relationship between them and adverbs, as well as their transitive and predicative character. The objective is to summarize the knowledge built around null prepositions, while placing them in a didactic perspective.
Keywords: O rphan prepositions, null arguments, transitivity, definiteness, semantics.
