Prépositions et Noms de Pays et D'iles

We present a detailed account of the shapes of prepositional noun phrases which complement verbs of movement. These complements are interpreted as destinations of the movement. We use the example of names of countries and islands to show the complexity of the problem. Attempts to predict the choice of a preposition according to the morphology of names is only partially correct. In fact, we show that in order to describe exactly the use of prepositions, we have to display all the quadruples {Verb, Preposition, Article, Noun}. Subregularities can then be accounted for, by means of a representation by finite automata. This representation has the advantage to provide directly a recognition algorithm which has been applied to a corpus. We present a sample of the results thus obtained.