Italian has ‘prepositions followed by articles’ (preposizione articolate). This is a specific grammatical type, which refers to a word (e.g. della) that replaces a preposition (di) followed by an article (la):

	il	lo	l’	la	i	gli	le
di	del	dello	dell’	della	dei	degli	delle
a	al	allo	all’	alla	ai	agli	alle
da	dal	dallo	dall’	dalla	dai	dagli	dalle
in	nel	nello	nell’	nella	nei	negli	nelle
su	sul	sullo	sull’	sulla	sui	sugli	sulle

This specific grammatical type also corresponds to:

• in French: du = de le, des = de les
• in Corsican and especially in the Sartenese variant: ‘llu = di lu, ‘lla = di la, etc.

This raises the general problem of the number of grammatical types we should retain. Should we create new grammatical types beyond the classical ones, in order to optimise translators and NLP in general? What is the best grammatical type to retain for ‘prepositions followed by an article’: a new primitive one or a compound one (always keeping Occam’s razor in mind)? A preposition followed by an article behaves like a preposition for words on its left, and like an article for words on its right.