Les emplois absolus de la préposition depuis

The French preposition depuis can be used to express a temporal as well as a spatial starting point. This paper focuses on its absolute use, i.e. the possibility of omission of its complement, which is restricted to its temporal meaning. Two types of analyses have beenput forward to deal with the absolute use of prepositions: adverbial recategorization on the one hand and post-prepositional ellipsis or zero anaphora on the other hand. This corpus-based study demonstratesthat both perspectives fail to account for the absolute use of depuis.Indeed, considering its distribution, semantics and discourse properties, it is shown that depuis should be more accurately analyzedas an anaphoric connective when used without a complement.