Les prépositions complexes en français

In this paper, we develop a new method of identification of complex prepositions, in French. We include well-known semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and introduce a few others – together, these tests make up a multi-variable grid which we believe can help identify complex prepositions. We run these tests on a list of 75 sequences, most of which are considered to be complex adpositions. We also include sequences which share the same patterns of word formation but do not have prepositional uses, in order to check the validity of our grid. Our results show that the semantic and morpho-syntactic clues used to identify complex adpositions, combined with corpus data exploration, are on the whole quite effective, but to varying degrees depending on the pattern of formation.