L’accord de proximité en genre : quelques considérations diachroniques

Abstract

According to Moreau (2019), masculine agreement was dominant in middle French, in case of mixed gender coordinated nouns. According to Abeillé et al. (2018), An and Abeillé (2021a), feminine agreement is dominant for determiners and prenominal adjectives in contemporary French when the first noun is feminine. Looking at the evolution in Frantext database since 1550, we show that (feminine) proximate agreement is persistent in two cases: determiner agreement (certaines branches et problèmes “certain.F.PL branch.F.PL and problem.M.PL”) and attributive adjective agreement (les us et coutumes familiales “the habit.M.PL and custom.F.PL familial.F.PL”). Feminine proximate agreement is dominant for determiners and prenominal adjectives, and is coming back for postnominal adjectives, while it has disappeared for predicative adjectives (son bec et ses jambes sont longues “his beak.M.SG and his leg.F.PL are long.F.PL”). If one considers masculine and feminine proximate agreement, it remains high and still exists for predicate adjectives.

Keywords

• adjective
• closest conjunct agreement
• determiner
• French
• gender