Confirming Prepositional Phrases

[Tobias Brown]

I have worked up a list of about 150 common prepositional phrases from various sites, often without translations. I confirmed some items with a retired French professor who lives nearby, but he seemed shaky on many of these and fatigued with the task so I didn't want to bother him. So, how could I efficiently confirm all of these items BEFORE I begin drilling them? I've found that Larousse online has most of these but still it's time-consuming. I have this as a Google doc if you're interested... As well, am I missing any very common prepositional locutions (phrases)?

Thanks.

[Frank]

Wow, that's one extensive list.

Some remarks:

"à court de" can indeed mean "pressed for" but also "short of".

"à dessein de" is extremely formal and always written, not said. Ditto for "conséquemment à" and "en sus de".

"jusqu'à et compris" should probably be "jusqu'à et y compris".

[Tobias Brown]

Maybe install this somewhere on your site and we can work on it as a group.

But initially, as you comment above, it would be useful to know, at least, that none of these are wildly incorrect.

D'accord!

[Frank]

It's not my site, but Neil might be interested in this list, which could indeed be very helpful to a lot of people here.

[Neil Coffey]

Thanks for sharing this with us, and sorry for my slow reply (will be a bit bogged down in a translation job for the next couple of days, but will try to stay on top of the forum as best I can!).

Having had a glance at the list, the main thing I wonder is, what's the criterion for deciding that something is a "prepositional prhase" and should be included in the list. For example, you have various formulae of the type "en X de...", but I wonder how you arrived at this particular list of X? (e.g. why include "en forme de...", but not "en guise de..."). Similarly, why include "bien loin de..." as well as "loin de...", but not "tout près de..." as well as "près de..."-- and if you start including modifiers like "bien", how do you decide "when to stop"-- you could end up doubling up various of the entries this way. (And again... what's so special about "jusque dans" that means you include this, but not "jusque devant...", "jusqu'en face de..." etc...)

Be careful of the meanings of some ("en sus de" means "in addition to" -- nothing to do with knowledge). To check the meanings of phrases like this, you should generally look up the "main" word in the dictionary (so in a formula "en X de...", look up X).

All that said, congratulations on your work so far and good luck with refining the list! And I'm sure if you do want some examples/discussion of particular phrases, you'll get some valuable input from this group.

[Tobias Brown]

Similar to your study of the most common verb forms, which I find extremely useful, my goal is to have a starter list of the most common prepositional phrases. I expect that being familiar with these will be very helpful in trying to read basic French text.

[Tobias Brown]

Did all of the other entries look okay to you? Thanks!

[Frank]

Yes, Tobias, other entries look fine!

[Tobias Brown]

Thanks so much!