Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In my talk, I will first try to show, starting from recent proposals such as D'Alessandro/Roberts 2008, 2010 for Italian, that the rule of past participle agreement in Standard French consists of two different subrules, only one of which corresponds to agreement regularities found in natural languages. Performance data from three different corpora will be used in a second step to show that native speakers of French struggle applying one (agreement in constructions with avoir), but not with the other (agreement in constructions with être), a hint at the learnt character of the first one. I will propose finally that standard French past participle agreement is a partially artificial phenomenon which should be discarded from research on the syntax of natural languages."

D’Alessandro, Roberta / Roberts, Ian (2008), “Movement and Agreement in Italian Past Participles and Defective Phases”, in: Linguistic Inquiry 39-3, 477-491.

D’Alessandro, Roberta / Roberts, Ian (2010), “Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter“, in: Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41-72 .