La préposition chez en français: analyse syntactico-sémantique et traduction en italien

Derived from the Latin noun casa, the French locative preposition chez, which always governs a human noun, is unique in Romance languages. Little studied until now, chez is characterised by the possibility of designating both concrete places ("spatial localisation" uses: house, institution, shop, workplace, city, country) and abstract places ("abstract localisation" uses: body, mind, work, community). Based on the syntactic and semantic properties of the French preposition and on translational data collected from a parallel bilingual corpus of contemporary French prose texts and their Italian translations, this study proposes a new contrastive classification of the uses of chez, listing the most frequent Italian translations for each meaning of the French preposition. The result is that, depending on the meaning it takes on in context, chez can be translated into Italian by six different prepositions, including five preposizioni proprie (a, da, in, per, tra) and one preposizione impropria avverbiale (presso).