Past Participle Agreements in French: Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

The concord system of the French past participle is based on a series of rules, mainly semantico-‑syntactic, which means it requires the ability of functional analysis, and consequently also good grammatical skills and knowledge. The concord system features many exceptions, in which agreement is either obligatory or forbidden contrary to the speaker’s linguistic intuition – apart from extraordinary and ambivalent instances. Our goal was to assess student knowledge of concord rules for the past participle in French as a foreign language. We prepared a quiz consisting of 33 sentences that tests knowledge of particular rules. It allows to isolate rules that are particularly difficult to students, which in turn helps find appropriate didactic solutions.