The use of French ‘à travers (de)’ and ‘au travers de’ for describing a movement along a curved surface: peripheral membership or anomaly?

This paper aims at providing a thorough analysis of a rare use where French au
travers (de) (meaning 'way through' or 'across') expresses a movement along a
curved surface. I try to determine whether this use should be considered a
peripheral member of a prototypical category or an anomaly. After a short
methodological section, the entire group of expressions containing French
travers 'through' is briefly presented; particular attention is devoted to the
different uses of au travers (de). Subsequently, I rely on precise analytical tools
in order to carry out an in-depth analysis of the utterances under study (all
dating from the 16th Century) and to compare them with semantically close
examples from the same period. Finally, I come to the very subject of this
contribution: I argue that the flatness of the surface is a fundamental
characteristic of the category at hand, which entails that the tokens analysed
should be viewed as anomalous side steps that did not involve any real
extension of the category.

Publication year:2012

Keywords:spatial prepositions, historical semantics, diachronic linguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics