Autour de la préposition contains 29 articles, all but two written in French, covering a wide range of topics around a common theme, the category of prepositions. As the title quite rightly signals, the anthology does not provide a general description of the subject at hand, but rather a mosaic of theoretical perspectives, methodologies and empirical data from various languages. The articles are based on papers presented at an international conference held at the University of Caen in September 2007. The overall quality of the volume is high and it is obviously not possible to do justice to the individual articles in this short review.

The book is neatly divided into three thematic sections preceded by a brief introduction. The first section raises the question of how to define this part of speech. Gaatone opens by suggesting a distinction between true and false prepositions. The author shows, through the use of a battery of examples, how the French prepositions à and de do not fit the generally accepted definition criteria in many of their uses. Mardale follows suit distinguishing between functional and lexical prepositions in Rumanian. Along the same lines, Moline and Desmets discuss the problem of providing a clear-cut categorization of the French comme whereas Rocq-Migette explores deverbal prepositions in English such as barring and considering with a view to establishing to what extent they can be considered as prepositions from a functional point of view. Indeed, the difficulty of regarding prepositions as a homogeneous category is the main thread throughout this section. Some authors approach this issue by way of comparison with other categories: prefixes (Heyna and Van Goethem), conjunctions (Piot) and, in the case of the Basque language, postpositions (Bottineau). Others use data from languages for which the Indo-European categorization model is inadequate. Do-Hurinville shows for instance that contrary to what is claimed in modern Vietnamese grammars, the distinction between conjunctions and prepositions is uncalled for in this language. Toussaint provides some very eloquent examples illustrating how the Chinese language is at odds with the very idea of objective categorization. The two remaining articles in this section would probably have fitted better into the following section, as they do not address questions relating to categorical boundaries. Roy and Svenonius’ contribution, written in English, gives a decompositional analysis of complex prepositions. The authors provide a theoretical model explaining how French spatial expressions develop into temporal ones and from there into causal expressions. Legallois and Schnedeckers’ article explores the differences between the two French expressions par manière de and en manière de with regard to their frequency and distribution.

The following section is devoted to the semantics of prepositions. Franckel's contribution challenges the widely accepted distinction between so-called colourful and colourless prepositions and proposes a new classification based on whether the preposition indicates a division of a given area into zones (spatial, temporal or other) or a mode of apprehension. Yousfi advocates the use of abstract values and function as a basis for defining prepositions rather than attributing a core status to spatial relations. Fortis’ contribution echoes Yousfi's stance, raising interesting questions regarding the preponderant role attributed to perception in cognitive approaches to prepositions. The remaining contributions in this section deal with specific prepositions: the Italian da (Luraghi), the English to (Hamelin) the French prepositions dans (Fagard and Sarda), par (Homma) nonobstant (Montagne) après (Sfar) sur (Borillo), avec (Portine) and hors (Vaguer) or the alternation of prepositions in specific expressions: in/on the street (Violet) and capacité de / à (Fraczak). Several of the contributions in this section use data from corpora such as the BNC and Frantext.

The third and last section offers three contributions presenting findings based on psycholinguistic data. Sahraoui's article deals with how agrammatical aphasia affects the use of prepositions in French and discusses whether the strategies used by subjects exhibiting aphasia can provide a better understanding of how prepositions function. Sekali and Morgenstern present a very interesting contrastive study on the acquisition of prepositions by French and English children showing that the characteristics of the language system greatly influence the grammaticalisation process and that French children display a wider use of prepositions with functional meanings than English children. The latter group use prepositions with spatial meanings to a much larger extent than the former. Vincent-Durroux's study on the use of prepositions by French and English children and adolescents suffering from profound deafness seems to reach a contrary conclusion. The author suggests that her findings support the overall primacy of spatial and temporal meanings of prepositions.

The observation above illustrates one of the main challenges of anthologies like this one. The volume offers many valuable insights into various aspects of prepositions, but it is often difficult to reconcile the conclusions of one contribution with those of the next. Needless to say, differences in terminology add to the problem. To give an example, the reader is presented with the following dichotomies which to a certain degree overlap one another: true versus false, functional versus lexical, colourful versus colourless, full versus empty prepositions. However, viewed as a smorgasbord, the volume is a substantial contribution to knowledge on a part of speech that escapes easy definition.