Past Participle Agreements in French: Corpus-Based Analysis Cover Image

Étude des stratégies d’accord du participe passé d’étudiants polonais à partir d’un corpus écrit
Past Participle Agreements in French: Corpus-Based Analysis

Author(s): Magdalena Dańko, Fabrice Marsac
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Foreign languages learning
Published by: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL & Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
Keywords: past participle in French; corpus-based analysis; acquisition/teaching of French as a foreign language

Summary/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.

  • Issue Year: 64/2016
  • Issue No: 8
  • Page Range: 141-158
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: French