Quatre prépositions causales du français

The paper studies the meaning and the cooccurrence of four French prepositions used to express the causal relation: À CAUSE DE, SOUS L’EFFET DE, DE, and PAR. Each preposition is characterized along the three following aspects: (1) the type of causation it expresses (direct? with contact? with unity of time?); (2) semantic restrictions on the complement of the preposition — the noun phrase that denotes the cause, as well as on the phrase governing the preposition and denoting the effect; (3) the preposition’s lexical and syntactic restricted cooccurrence. The lexicographic descriptions of the four prepositions are presented.