20 Thomas Egan
in French, as in (34b). These two prepositions are also used to encode Motion
‘betweenness’, as in (35a) and (36b).
(35) a. “Joker slinks restlessly amongst the elves like a spy in the fairy-tale.”
(JG3TE)
b. – Dans le conte, le Joker rôde parmi les elfes tel un espion. (JG3TF)
(36) a. The Marquis chattered about everything and nothing on the way, as
excited as a child as we pushed past women with baskets and traders with
cartloads of fish. (NF1TE)
b. Enflammé comme un enfant, le marquis parlait de tout et de rien tandis
que nous nous frayions un chemin au milieu des femmes chargées de
paniers et des marchands de poissons poussant leurs charretons. (NF1TF)
(37) a. It was always Tomas who had to fetch a ladder and climb through the pale,
valanced curtains to open the door. (HW2TE)
b. C’était toujours Tomas qui, ensuite, devait aller chercher une échelle et se
faufiler à travers les légers rideaux à volants pour aller ouvrir la porte.
(HW2TF)
Among(st) accounts for just over 50% of the encodings of Motion ‘betweenness’ in
English by prepositions other than between. There is no such dominant preposi-
tion in French. Au milieu de and parmi (35b) are the two most common, but we
also find both sous and sur, both de and à and combinations of the latter two. Note
that the direction of motion in (35)–(37) is not between two stipulated points.
Rather the trajector traverses a space situated between these two points. This is
in fact the dominant trajectory in tokens of Motion ‘betweenness’ (the sense of
‘between the posts’ in rugby as opposed to ‘between the wickets’ in cricket). The
act of traversing this space can be construed as entering and exiting a container,
thus motivating the employment of the default throughness prepositions, through
and à travers in (37). It has often been noted in contrastive studies of motion that
French, as a verb-framed language, tends to encode the path of motion by means
of the verb (see Hickman & Robert 2006: 4, for example). This is not the case in
(35)–(37). In the first two examples this may be related to the fact that the direc-
tion of the path is underspecified.
Figure 4 is an attempt to represent visually the overlap between the preposi-
tions most commonly used to code ‘betweenness’ in English and French in the
texts in the OMC. Although not drawn to scale, it does indicate the degree of
overlap between the various prepositions. Thus both in and dans occur in the
same contexts as between and entre. This is not the case for parmi, amongst and à
travers. As stated in the previous section with respect to Figure 3, investigations of
‘betweenness’ in other corpora would no doubt allow us to draw a more accurate
picture of the overlap between the two languages. The space outside the circles