This chapter first establishes the quantitative evolution of the uses of over the course of the 16 century, and then proposes a corpus-based list of the nominal collocates statistically preferred as complements of the French prepositions , and over the same period of time. The study and comparison of the contexts in which these collocates emerged enable us to better identify the differences in the use of the three prepositions in the 16 century, especially where they were in competition with each other from a distributional point of view. The corpus used is a set of literary texts from the (Epistemon Corpus), with the addition of a few texts from the . The tool used is the textometric platform TXM developed at the ENS de Lyon.