Comportements, déguisements, rôles de fiction…

This paper focuses on a set of utterances that all contain a prepositional phrase (PP) in intrapredicative position, in the form en + NP, and mainly denoting a behaviour, a disguise or a fictitious role. The study first proposes a brief overview of previous studies of these uses of en since G. Guillaume (1919), before going on to examine the PPs from a syntactic and semantic point of view. Lastly, it is argued that in all the utterances examined, the PPs denote the result of a more or less abstract transformation process.