# Past participle agreement in spoken and written French



## Nino83

On the basis of a study of Monique Audibert-Gibier, _Etude de l'accord du participe passé sur de corpus de française parlé_, _Université de Provence,_ (on http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/lsoc_0181-4095_1992_num_61_1_2573) the rules about the agreement of the past participle in spoken French are different from the ones taught at school. 
The study concentrates on those verbs which have a different pronunciation for the feminine gender (_dire, faire, mettre, prendre, asseoir, écrire, inscrire, ouvrir, couvrir_) in spoken French and 300 cases are tested (in which the agreement is mandatory according to the grammatical rules). 

With the ausiliar verb _être_, on 23 cases there are only 14 agreements (9 out of 11 with the verb _faire_). 
With the ausiliar verb _avoir_ with object pronouns _me, te, nous, vous_, on 6 cases there is only one case of agreement, with object pronouns_ la, les_ past participle agrees with object pronoun 28 out of 44 cases in which post-verbal position is empty (64%, but 33% when post-verbal position is full, with the verb _faire_ percentages are 80% instead of 64%). If after_ la, les_ there is _lui_, there's no agreement (0%, even if the post-verbal position is empty). 
 Relative pronouns (_que, quel)_ and adverbs (_comme, combien_) have lower percentages (34% when the post-verbal position is empty, 24% in other cases, 27% and 16% with the verb _faire_). 
When there is _faire + infinitive_ the percentage of agreement is 60%. 
There are few examples with pronominal verbs, but it seems that the agreement is easier when there is the pronoun _se_ with a passive sense. 

So, past participle agreement is easier when the post-verbal position is empty (64%-33% with _avoir_ and_ la, les_, 34%-24% with _que__, quel, comme, combien_). Agreement is easier with_ la, les_ than with _me, te, vous, nous_. 
With verb _être_ past participle agreement is not systematic (61%, easier when post-verbal position is empty). 
When there is _la + lui_, there's no agreement. With verb _faire_ percentages are higher (80% with _avoir + la, les_). 

In 1989 _AIROE_ (_Association pour l'Information et la Recherche sur les Orthographes et  systèmes d'Ecriture_) said:
_
"In most cases, agreement is  purely a feature of the written language. However, studies of present tendencies  reveal that more and more people fail to make the agreement even when it appears  orally, such as in la faute que j'ai commise (or commis). AIROE feels  that this increasing latitude in the spoken language should be echoed by a similar  tolerance for written forms, and that *failure* to note the past participle agreement  *in writing* *should no longer* be considered as a *mistake*._" 

http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j7/world.php 

Among Romance Languages French is the one with the greatest difference between spoken and written form in this matter. 
In Italian and Catalan past participle agrees in spoken and written form, in Romanian, Spanish and Portuguese it doesn't. 

Why French regulators haven't accepted this request? 

Ciao 

P.S.
There's no great difference between baccalaureates, 37%, and undergraduate, 25%.


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## CapnPrep

Nino83 said:


> Why French regulators haven't accepted this request?


Because they are expected to function as a conservative force to counterbalance the innovative forces of informal, spoken usage. It is of course debatable whether they can in fact offer any effective resistance, but that is their function.


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## fdb

There is an argument for retaining the rules in the existing normative grammars (which are at least largely consistent), and an argument for abandoning participle agreement altogether. But the suggestion that it should all be left to the whim of individual writers is not a good one.


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## merquiades

I do not see why written conventions need to parallel developments in speech patterns.  Yes, people might not make the agreement orally when it is needed and others just might not have a clue when to make agreement anyhow (those same people might write _vous avez parler_ too), but why should rules be simplified to consecrate bad usage?  It's better just to teach people these agreement rules that exist for a reason and make them aware of the mistakes they are making.


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## Nino83

Thanks for the answers. 



I don't think that regulators ought to approve mistakes. 

In Italian, up to 1950, past participle often agreed with direct objects placed before the verb, as in _la lettera che ha scritta__ (la lettre qu'il a écrite)_, but it fell into disuse. 

With first and second person object pronouns only occasionally past participle agrees, as in _ti ho vista ieri (je t'ai vue hier__)_, but it always agrees with third person object pronouns, as in _l'ho vista ieri (je l'ai vue hier)_. 

So, Italian regulators stated that in the first two cases (_che/que; mi/me, ti/te, ci/nous, vi/vous_) past participle agreement is facultative and in the third case it's mandatory. 



The French case is quite similar. Few agreements with _que_ and _me, te, nous, vous_ and most agreement with _le, la, les_. 

I repeat that There's no great difference between baccalaureates and undergraduate. The percentage of agreement is 37% among baccalaureates. It is not a mistake and it is not considered a mistake in spoken language. 



If an English "Académie" said that people should use second person _thou_ with second verb conjugation all would make fun of it. One can't write as people spoke one or two hundred years ago.  


It seems to me that l'Académie Française is too much conservative than Italian, Spanish or Portuguese regulators. 

All this in my humble opinion  

Ciao


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## CapnPrep

Nino83 said:


> It seems to me that l'Académie Française is too much conservative than Italian, Spanish or Portuguese regulators.
> 
> All this in my humble opinion


OK, your opinion is recorded. What more do we need to say here?


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> I don't think that regulators ought to approve mistakes.


Well, the issue is what is and what isn't a "mistake". If everybody agreed, there wouldn't be this discussion.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> I do not see why written conventions need to  parallel developments in speech patterns.  Yes, people might not make  the agreement orally when it is needed and others just might not have a  clue when to make agreement anyhow (those same people might write _vous avez parler_  too), but why should rules be simplified to consecrate bad usage?  It's  better just to teach people these agreement rules that exist for a  reason and make them aware of the mistakes they are making.





berndf said:


> Well, the issue is what is and what isn't a  "mistake". If everybody agreed, there wouldn't be this  discussion.



It's difficult (and it would be discourteous) for me to believe that educated French people make mistakes about past participle agreement 3 times out of 5 (in spoken language). 
As this study (and AIROE) says, there are probably different rules between written and spoken language.


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> It's difficult (and it would be discourteous) for me to believe that educated French people make mistakes about past participle agreement 3 times out of 5 (in spoken language).


As a side note, saying that someone makes a language mistake is not discourteous, in my opinion. Also, educated people can well make language mistakes. What makes usage a mistake is probably either discomfort and feeling of hinderance, or a fault in communication, that people, especially literate, may be expected to have while listening or reading [to] the text.


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## Peterdg

Nino83 said:


> _
> "In most cases, agreement is  purely a feature of the written language. However, studies of present tendencies  reveal that more and more people fail to make the agreement even when it appears  orally, such as in la faute que j'ai commise (or commis). AIROE feels  that this increasing latitude in the spoken language should be echoed by a similar  tolerance for written forms, and that *failure* to note the past participle agreement  *in writing* *should no longer* be considered as a *mistake*._"


In my opinion this is a ridiculous request of the AIROE.

In speech you can also not hear the difference between "parler", "parlez", "parlé" and "parlée". Should they also decide to write them the same?

It is true though that spelling in French, by the French, is generally a disaster, and not only among "uneducated" people. I used to work for a French company for about 20 years and you really cannot imagine the spelling of the  French written communication issued by the French native speakers; and this was all coming from engineers and other university level people.

For some reason, they either don't have a clue on the grammatical rules or they don't care a damn.

I have already mentioned this in another thread but we once received a survey on one A4 page. There were more than 20 spelling mistakes on that single page. And this was not even continuous text: it was a number of questions and multiple choice answers.


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## learnerr

Peterdg said:


> In speech you can also not hear the difference between "parler", "parlez", "parlé" and "parlée". Should they also decide to write them the same?


I think Nino's issue was different. This is the case where the forms of participle are indistinguishable in sound for historical reasons, and Nino was talking of cases where the forms of participle are distinguishable, yet people use one form in writing and the other in speech. (I personally think, why not? speech and writing are indeed different activities).


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## Peterdg

Yes, I agree it's not exactly the same, but his/her argument was based on speech; that's why I used this, rather obvious, example which is also based on speech.


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## merquiades

I agree with Peter, mistakes, even atrocious mistakes are frequent, but that has to do more with some kind of failure in French schooling than anything else.  It certainly needs revising.  Older people don't have as much trouble writing French.  That of course is another topic.

Language grammar is an ideal and should be upheld.  Rules of agreement are important to the structure of the language, be they broken or not.  They should not be dumbed down to make match people's lack of instruction or make the language seem easier.  Personally I think it's a shame if they made direct object agreement optional in Italian.


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## learnerr

merquiades said:


> I agree with Peter, mistakes, even atrocious mistakes are frequent, but that has to do more with some kind of failure in French schooling than anything else.


Maybe this has more to do with the question, "why they don't want to learn spelling and grammar", than with the question, "why they can't succeed in learning them"; better schooling can help the second, but hardly the first.


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## merquiades

learnerr said:


> Maybe this has more to do with the question, "why they don't want to learn spelling and grammar", than with the question, "why they can't succeed in learning them"; better schooling can help the second, but hardly the first.



I don't think people care one way or another about correct grammar.  It's not a common topic of conversation of interest except among literary types who complain there is not much time put into it in school nowadays.  Beyond agreement, the subjunctive is also often badly used nowadays, and many people have no idea how to use the simple past tense.  They spontaneously make up forms whenever they try to use it.


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## Peterdg

learnerr said:


> Maybe this has more to do with the question, "why they don't want to learn spelling and grammar", than with the question, "why they can't succeed in learning them"; better schooling can help the second, but hardly the first.


Oh yes, schooling can also help the first one. For example, 
in Dutch we have a spelling "issue" with verbal forms ending in "d", "dt" or "t". They sound the same but there is a very logical explanation behind it; you just need to be forced to think about it when you are writing. Well, when I was studying (a long time ago, I know), when we had a test, your score would have been zero if you had made only one mistake against this rule. I assure you, you only do this once and it stays in your system for the rest of your life.

EDIT: the type of test didn't matter. It may have been a test of mathematics, history, geography, ... whatever. One "d-t-dt" mistake and your score was zero.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Language grammar is an ideal and should be upheld.  Rules of agreement are important to the structure of the language, be they broken or not.  They should not be dumbed down to make match people's lack of instruction or make the language seem easier.  Personally I think it's a shame if they made direct object agreement optional in Italian.


On the other hand, languages do change. And many languages have lost agreement rules without any less respectable a language; notably English. Direct object agreement rules can only be explained historically and make no immediate sense in the modern language. If an agreement rule deserves to go, then it is this one.


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## Peterdg

I agree languages do change, but that's not the issue. (I'm only talking about the French situation; I don't know anything about the Italian situation). Agreement is still made in oral language by educated speakers: I can not imagine someone in my circle *not* making the right agreement is a sentence like "Les choses qu'ils ont *faites*, sont impardonables". I don't deny there may be people not making the right agreement here, but I consider that to be a mistake (like there are many more mistakes people make). I don't think French is in the position yet to abandon this correspondance as it is still very alife (at least by a vast number of speakers).

There is another "correspondance" rule however that indeed can be abolished: the one with the "se" construction (type:_ Il s'est lavé(es) les mains_). That is one that doesn't make any sense at all and that nobody understands or is able to interpret correctly.


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## merquiades

Peterdg said:


> There is another "correspondance" rule however that indeed can be abolished: the one with the "se" construction (type:_ Il s'est lavé(es) les mains_). That is one that doesn't make any sense at all and that nobody understands or is able to interpret correctly.



It makes sense if you think about the direct/indirect object rule:

Marie s'est lavée.  (agreement as _se_ is a direct object referring to Marie)
Marie s'est lavé les mains.  (_se_ is indirect,  l_es mains_ is direct but follow the verb)
Marie se les est lavées.  (_se_ is indirect, _les_ is the object pronoun and agrees with past participle)

The only problem is that in this case l_avé_, _lavée_, _lavés_, _lavés_ sound the same, so it's particularly hard to know what agrees with what.  But no need to abolish it.  
There are cases with non-regular -er verbs where the ending can be heard and educated speakers would make it orally even in this case.

Se dire la vérité.
Elles se sont dit la vérité
Elles se la sont dite.


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## learnerr

Peterdg said:


> Oh yes, schooling can also help the first one. For example,
> in Dutch we have a spelling "issue" with verbal forms ending in "d", "dt" or "t". They sound the same but there is a very logical explanation behind it; you just need to be forced to think about it when you are writing. Well, when I was studying (a long time ago, I know), when we had a test, your score would have been zero if you had made only one mistake against this rule. I assure you, you only do this once and it stays in your system for the rest of your life.


Do you think those French people had excellent grades in their writing tests, making the same mistakes they made outside school? If they did, I agree there is of course a problem with the system of schools; but simpler to suppose they either a) got low grades in their tests and didn't care about that, or b) made spelling right and preferred not to think about it outside school. By the way, I never saw any spelling mistakes involving agreement of participles in the French Wikipedia, which is interesting, because in many articles of the Russian Wikipedia grammar (punctuation) is awful, often even in articles marked as excellent. Very possibly, I missed a lot.

EDIT: if teachers pay attention to their students' spelling not only in grammar classes, but in all other classes as well, that must be a very good incentive, I agree.


berndf said:


> Direct object agreement rules can only be explained historically and make no immediate sense in the modern language.


Why do you think so? First, even if someone does not know the history of this feature (I don't), it still makes sense since the most important bits are easy to guess. Second, it makes sense simply because it exists and also is useful. The difference between reading and listening is that the first requires from me that I link ideas more carefully; participle agreement is exactly about such links. Why should people treat oral speech as superior (or, for that matter, inferior) to written speech? The two have different domains of use and different traditions, conditions, requirements, history.


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## Peterdg

learnerr said:


> Do you think those French people had excellent grades in their writing tests, making the same mistakes they made outside school? If they did, I agree there is of course a problem with the system of schools; but simpler to suppose they either a) got low grades and didn't care about that, or b) made spelling right in their tests and preferred not to think about it outside school.


I have no idea on how they scored on writing tests. The issue is that the school should impose to always write correctly, *not only in writing tests* but always, also in tests of mathematics, history etc. That's the point I was making and that's where the education system fails. They test writing in writing tests and they stop caring when they are talking about e.g. mathematics. They should always care and the schooling system should impose that. Schooling is not only providing knowledge but it's also about cultivating attitudes.


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## learnerr

Peterdg said:


> I have no idea on how they scored on writing tests. The issue is that the school should impose to always write correctly, *not only in writing tests* but always, also in tests of mathematics, history etc.


Sorry, I missed your edit when I started posting.


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## Peterdg

merquiades said:


> It makes sense if you think about the direct/indirect object rule:


Yes, I know that (or at least, I think I do). But there are the more difficult situations. Take e.g. a look at this thread. And, I also remember the very lively discussions at the office where I finally decided not to care anymore because nobody seemed to know how it worked in all situations.



learnerr said:


> Sorry, I missed your edit when I started posting.


Don't worry. I should have mentioned it when I first wrote my reply: I know editing is prone to people missing what one says in the edit.


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## berndf

Peterdg said:


> I agree languages do change, but that's not the issue. (I'm only talking about the French situation; I don't know anything about the Italian situation). Agreement is still made in oral language by educated speakers: I can not imagine someone in my circle *not* making the right agreement is a sentence like "Les choses qu'ils ont *faites*, sont impardonables". I don't deny there may be people not making the right agreement here, but I consider that to be a mistake (like there are many more mistakes people make). I don't think French is in the position yet to abandon this correspondance as it is still very alife (at least by a vast number of speakers).


I said _*IF* an agreement rule deserves to go_. The community of speakers of a language has the right to decide where they want to take their language, whether to canonize a change or to stigmatize it as an "error". There is no objective criterion to tell an _error _from a _change_ except consensus view by the community. I objected to the statement _Rules of agreement are important to the structure of the language_. French will not loose consistency or beauty or anything else, if French speakers decided to give up this particular agreement rule. But if (educated) speakers prefer to keep it... so be it. If they decide to drop it... so be it.


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## berndf

Peterdg said:


> Schooling is not only providing knowledge but it's also about cultivating attitudes.


That is one opinion. I am sure, many people won't agree. At any rate, political statements like this one goes far beyond the scope of a linguistic discussion.


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## Peterdg

berndf said:


> I said _*IF* an agreement rule deserves to go_. The community of speakers of a language has the right to decide where they want to take their language, whether to canonize a change or to stigmatize it as an "error". There is no objective criterion to tell an _error _from a _change_ except consensus view by the community. I objected to the statement _Rules of agreement are important to the structure of the language_. French will not loose consistency or beauty or anything else, if French speakers decided to give up this particular agreement rule. But if (educated) speakers prefer to keep it... so be it. If they decide to drop it... so be it.


Bernd,

I can only agree with every word of that. (I must have misinterpreted your first comment somewhere).


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## Nino83

Peterdg said:


> Yes, I agree it's not exactly the same, but  his/her argument was based on speech; that's why I used this, rather  obvious, example which is also based on speech.





merquiades said:


> Personally I think it's a  shame if they made direct object agreement optional in Italian.



Probably there was a misunderstanding. 
There is an historical process which leads not to agree the past participle after the auxiliar verb _habere_. 

Vulgar Latin/early Romance: _habeba(m) littera(m) scripta(m)_ 
Romance Languages: _avevo scritto una lettera, j'avais écrit une lettre, había escrito una letra, tinha escrito uma letra_ 

In Italian past participle, since XIX-XX century, doesn't agree when there is _DO + che_ before the verb. Few agreements there are when there are first and second object pronoun before the verb. When there is third person object pronoun, past participle always agrees, in spoken and written language. Written = spoken. 
With auxiliar _essere_ (some intransitive verbs, pronominal verbs, passive form) past participle always agrees with the subject (or third person object pronouns preceeding the verb). 

In Spanish and Portuguese there's no agreement when there is the auxiliar _haber/ter_. With auxiliar _ser_ (passive form) past participle agrees. Written = spoken. 

In French there is this situation. With auxiliar _avoir_ past participle agreement percentages are low with_ DO + que_ or with first and second person object pronouns, low with _le, la, les__ + full post-verbal position_ and medium (64%) with _le, la, les + empty post-verbal position_. So the written form differs from the spoken one. 

Remarque de Tesnière (1959) disait:
_« Aussi bien l'usage actuel est-il purement livresque, et aujourd'hui  l'accord préconisé par la grammaire ne se fait plus même dans la langue  parlée courante des personnes cultivées. On dit sans sourciller : " *la lettre que j'ai écrit*  ". La règle est morte de complications. Au-dessous d'elle, le participe  antérieur français a déjà atteint le même état d'invariabilité qu'en  provençal, en espagnol, en portugais et en roumain. » _

It seems that l'Académie Française tries to stop this historical process.


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## Peterdg

berndf said:


> That is your opinion. Many people won't agree. At any rate, political statements like this one goes far, far beyond the scope of a linguistic discussion.


You are too fast. And here I don't agree (I think). Using a language well is also a question of education, i.e. schooling, and as such, it can be  part of a linguistic discussion (of course, that depends on what your definitions are). There is nobody who doubts that 5+5 should be equal to 10, whether it be in a math class or in history, geography or any other class. However, writing correctly is apparently only important in a writing test.


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## berndf

Peterdg said:


> You are too fast. And here I don't agree (I think). Using a language well is also a question of education, i.e. schooling, and as such, it can be  part of a linguistic discussion (of course, that depends on what your definitions are). There is nobody who doubts that 5+5 should be equal to 10, whether it be in a math class or in history, geography or any other class. However, writing correctly is apparently only important in a writing test.


I view linguistics as a the science of how language _is_ and not about how it _should be_. But I can see how one may have a different opinion. On the other hand, the statement _Schooling is not only providing knowledge but it's also about cultivating attitudes_ certainly adds a dimension to the discussion that is not linguistic any more.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> There is no objective criterion to tell an _error _from a _change_ except consensus view by the community.


I would disagree. The difference between an error and non-error is not only that of social agreement. There is also some part in it that does not depend on our wish to make agreements; some usages hinder language understanding and others don't. It is like a hammer: you can use a hammer in different ways, but some of them are uncomfortable or make the nails go badly, while other ways may be good yet unused, let's say non-fashionable.  I could well agree with my friend that the word "blue" should be taken to mean "green" as well, but that would make life harder, because I would always understand him wrong at first, and so would he.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> I would disagree. The difference between an error and non-error is not only that of social agreement. There is also some part in it that does not depend on our wish to make agreements; some usages hinder language understanding and others don't. It is like a hammer: you can use a hammer in different ways, but some of them are uncomfortable or make the nails go badly, while other ways may be good yet unused, let's say non-fashionable.  I could well agree with my friend that the word "blue" should be taken to mean "green" as well, but that would make life harder, because I would always understand him wrong at first, and so would he.


Some things are easier to express in one language than in another one. We all know that. That doesn't make one language "wrong" and the other "right".


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> Some things are easier to express in one language than in another one. We all know that. That doesn't make one language "wrong" and the other "right".


Sorry? What does it have to do with my post?
Of course, my friend and I would speak a language that is different from the language of all other people around. We could find a fancy name for it, "Bluish". The problem would not be that it is different, the problem would be that we ourselves do not understand each other well enough.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> Sorry? What does it have to do with my post?


You said: "Some usages hinder language understanding and others don't". This means that canonizing such usages makes it more difficult to express certain things and you might have to express them in a more cumbersome way. If speakers of a language agree they accept that disadvantage then they have every right to do so. There is nothing that forces language to be maximally efficient. And real language aren't always maximally efficient.


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## learnerr

The essence of my post was that not always understanding of speech is conscious and can be subject to agreement, therefore not all mistakes are subject to conscious convention (as you said, "consensus view"). If people do a certain thing, it means that they, unconsciously or consciously, chose it and understand it. Good for them; but this may as well result from their lack of knowledge of some context, that other people know and that make other people unconsciously misunderstand the first people. This may also result from possessing some context that other people don't possess (firstly, the very fact that they know what they want to mean, and others don't).

To get a more mundane example, over-repetition of words and use of words with empty meaning are (stylistic) mistakes no matter what the grammar committee decides to write in its book.

ADD: I had not meant to write anything about efficiency. I understand my friend worse not because the two colour names in our speech have coincided, but because I have to make conscious effort to understand his naming of colours. The same problem is words with empty meaning: you have to guess what was meant. The same problem is over-repetition: you have to consciously get rid of the feeling that the repeated words refer to the same concept in the same situation.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> To get a more mundane example, over-repetition of words and use of words with empty meaning are (stylistic) mistakes no matter what the grammar committee decides to write in its book.


Certainly not. By calling a repetition an "over-repetition" you make a value judgement people are not forced to agree with.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> Certainly not. By calling a repetition an "over-repetition" you make a value judgement people are not forced to agree with.


They are not, indeed; they are not forced not to make mistakes. 
This is not so purely a value judgement, but judgement of how successful people were to mean for someone what they might want to mean. Like, my friend was unsuccessful despite our agreement: I cannot immediately understand his (and mine) scheme of naming colours.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> They are not, indeed; they are not forced not to make mistakes.
> This is not so purely a value judgement, but judgement of how successful people were to mean for someone what they might want to mean. Like, my friend was unsuccessful despite our agreement: I cannot immediately understand his (and mine) scheme of naming colours.


You lost me completely. What has all this to do with the decision whether or usage or non-usuage of a certain feature of a language, like DO-participle agreement, is a mistake or not and why such a decision should be more than pure convention.

Speakers may decide to use the word for blue to mean green in certain contexts, like Japanese where the green colour of plants is referred to as _aoi_ (blue). This is certainly not a "mistake" but Japanese simply divide the colour spectrum in a different way than English. Or they may decide not to differentiate between _green _and _blue_ at all,  like in Vietnamese where what we call _green_ and _blue _are considered shades of the same colour., like we regard _navy blue_ and _sky blue _as shades of the same basic colour. There is nothing inherently "right" or "wrong" with it. It is just a different convention.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> Speakers may decide to use the word for blue to mean green in certain contexts, like Japanese where the green colour of plants is referred to as _aoi_ (blue). This is certainly not a "mistake" but Japanese simply divide the colour spectrum in a different way than English. Or they may decide not to differentiate between _green _and _blue_ at all,  like in Vietnamese where what we call _green_ and _blue _are considered shades of the same colour., like we regard _navy blue_ and _sky blue _as shades of the same basic colour. There is nothing inherently "right" or "wrong" with it. It is just a different convention.


You see, I agree with everything except for the word "decide" (and therefore partly with the word "convention", that implies the word "decide"). Attitudes towards the text being read cannot be decided at will. So, the issue mistake/non-mistake is not purely political, it can be reasoned based on our possible knowledge about involuntary/unconscious handling of language, even if this knowledge and the kinds of reasoning associated with it cannot assure hard-and-absolute result. The base for reasoning is not "what feature is meant", but "who is going to use or disuse that feature", with the questions "what is or may be their experience with language", "what is or may be their experience in life", etc.


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## learnerr

[Have just seen your post]


merquiades said:


> I don't think people care one way or another about correct grammar.  It's not a common topic of conversation of interest except among literary types who complain there is not much time put into it in school nowadays.  Beyond agreement, the subjunctive is also often badly used nowadays, and many people have no idea how to use the simple past tense.  They spontaneously make up forms whenever they try to use it.


Well, I don't think this attitude is a general rule. I mean, conservative writing may be or not be prestigious, and if among wide circles of population it is not, then it survives only among those for whom it is; while if it is for many, then it survives among many. What Peterdg says – paying strict attention to grammar in all classes of school, not just those of language use – is actually, I think, a measure for making such writing prestigious rather than a measure to impose non-prestigious writing on people (the latter is an effort deemed to failure).


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> Attitudes towards the text being read cannot be decided at will.


Why not? We as society can decide whether or not to give pupils who write _La fille qu'il a vu_ rather than _La fille qu'il a vu*e*_ bad marks or not or (in English) pupils who write _the girl who I saw_ rather than _the girl who*m* I saw_.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> I would disagree. The difference between an  error and non-error is not only that of social agreement. There is also  some part in it that does not depend on our wish to make agreements;  some usages hinder language understanding and others don't.



The grammaticalization of past participle after the verb _habere_ just happened long time ago and no language understanding was hindered. 
Simply past participle after the verb _habere_ was seen as part of the verb, therefore indeclinable, and no more as an adjective (declinable). 

Spoken French is going in this direction. 
If a French professor or a journalist doesn't make past participle agreement (after the verb _avoir_) when he speaks with his parents or friends, without being corrected, it means that this grammaticalization is accepted. 
From the past exemples we can see that when the spoken language differs from the written one, the second adapts to the first.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> berndf said:
> 
> 
> 
> Direct object agreement rules can only be  explained historically and make no immediate sense in the modern  language.
> 
> 
> 
> Why do you think so?
Click to expand...

Nino explained it nicely in the his post just above this one.


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## Nino83

I also did an example in post #27:

Vulgar Latin/early Romance: _habeba(m) litter*a(m)* script*a(m)*_
Romance Languages: avevo scritt*o*  una letter*a*, j'avais écrit*Ø* une lettr*e*,  había escrit*o* una letr*a*, tinha escrit*o* uma letr*a*


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## Nanon

Peterdg said:


> I can not imagine someone in my circle *not* making the right agreement is a sentence like "Les choses qu'ils ont *faites* sont impardonnables".


Neither can I.
Although I must confess that some of my colleagues, and my boss, hate me for that  (I dare not even correct them, they just hate me because I make the agreement).


Peterdg said:


> There is another "correspondance" rule however that indeed can be abolished: the one with the "se" construction (type:_ Il s'est lavé(es) les mains_). That is one that doesn't make any sense at all and that nobody understands or is able to interpret correctly.


Agreed. The participle agreement does not add any information to the sentence.
If there was a consultation among speakers about rules that should be abolished, my vote would go to that one.  But the _Académie française_ is not a democracy... 


learnerr said:


> By the way, I never saw any spelling mistakes involving agreement of participles in the French Wikipedia, which is interesting, because in many articles of the Russian Wikipedia grammar (punctuation) is awful, often even in articles marked as excellent.


Really? I should enroll as a French Wikipedia editor. I am sure I would have a lot to do. True, there is not too much automatic translation as compared to some other languages (I usually have a glance at other versions in languages I know, to look for further information).


learnerr said:


> What Peterdg says – paying strict attention to grammar in all classes of school, not just those of language use – is actually, I think, a measure for making such writing prestigious rather than a measure to impose non-prestigious writing on people (the latter is an effort deemed to failure).


Spelling and grammar are not as extensively used as markers of prestige in schools as they used to be. Nowadays some students can be successful without writing well. One can even become President without being able to use simple past tense properly (see here), something unheard of +/- 30 years ago .


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> Why not? We as society can decide whether or not to give pupils who write _La fille qu'il a vu_ rather than _La fille qu'il a vu*e*_ bad marks or not or (in English) pupils who write _the girl who I saw_ rather than _the girl who*m* I saw_.


This is not as simple as it seems. First, we cannot control their language experience anyway, even if we happen to republish all corpus of French literature. If you used to know a friend who wrote _La fille qu'il a vue_, you remember that. The same in the opposite case. What are your attitudes towards their writing, depends solely on you and on all experience that you had while living and that shaped your mind. Second, we should have an explanation at hand for this decision. The second is simply unconscious & involuntary.
As a side note: I don't know whether French have such explanation or not; I do not know the French situation. I am talking in general, what is what and what leads to what. Judging by what Nanon says, I cannot conclude whether the change is imminent and soon the _Académie_ will have to acknowledge the _fait accompli_, or it is very far from that. If people are angry at her, therefore they believe her, right? On the other hand, she says they are majority...


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## Nanon

Learnerr, I did not say that a _majority _of people were angry at me - just _some _people are. And, immodest as it may sound, those guys must acknowledge, deep inside themselves, that they are green with envy, you are right . Because I stick to what is still a rule that makes sense to me. Nevertheless, if rules change, and if changes make sense, I will stick to the new rules. Therefore, no, I am neither a posh conservative nor a reincarnation of a stern school teacher .
And with all due respect, I think that Tesnière's example (1959) still makes my contemporary ears cringe.
On a side note, "la lettre que j'ai écrit" is not recent.


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> The grammaticalization of past participle after the verb _habere_ just happened long time ago and no language understanding was hindered.
> Simply past participle after the verb _habere_ was seen as part of the verb, therefore indeclinable, and no more as an adjective (declinable).


First, as I said, I don't know whether lack of this feature in texts written by some hinders their understanding or not. Second, let's see what we mean by hindering: what I mean is that if after each statement you say _BANG_, then understanding is hindered. It has not become impossible; but you have to think of aside things while trying to understand. (By Nanon's expression, your ears cringe ;-) ).


> From the past exemples we can see that when the spoken language differs from the written one, the second adapts to the first.


Ivenchuëli, pëhaps. Bät it mei teik ĸwait ë taim.


berndf said:


> learnerr said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> berndf said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Direct object agreement rules can only be  explained historically and make no immediate sense in the modern  language.
> 
> 
> 
> Why do you think so?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Nino explained it nicely in the his post just above this one.
Click to expand...

Nino did not address this part. He did not say that direct object agreement cannot make any sense to French people; he only explained that this sense is unused in the spoken language, and conjectured that the written language must or will adapt to the spoken language. Nothing about any sense being made.


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## learnerr

Nanon said:


> Learnerr, I did not say that a _majority _of people were angry at me - just _some _people are.


Sorry for misunderstanding. Missed the word. 
As for Wikipedia, I should have expressed myself more to-the-point; with my non-native and not-used-to eyes (I read French _very_ seldom) I of course do not notice many mistakes whose counterpart would make me bad when reading Russian, so I cannot make the direct comparison between the Wikipedias. What made me wonder is that Wikipedia Russian is more or less the same as Internet Russian, while Wikipedia French looked to me substantially better than some examples of Internet French that I had encountered. It looks that they worry for that.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> It has not become impossible; but you have to think of aside  things while trying to understand (by Nanon's expression, your ears  cringe ;-) ).



Yes, it could be, but if a French ear cringed every time one said _la lettre que j'ai écrit_ there wouldn't be 66% (76%, if the post-verbal position is full) of non-agreement of the past participle in spoken language. 

We, for example, never would say _Francesca l'ho vist*o* poco fa_, because one could think that there is a man called Francesca.  
So these "mistakes" are rare. 

There are a lot of linguists who say that past participle agreement after the verb _avoir_ is becoming less frequent in speech. 
Ferdinand Brunot, Lucien Tesnière, Marcel Cohen (in http://books.google.it/books?id=zim...not" "lucien tesnière" "marcel cohen"&f=false) or Grevisse (_La règle d'accord du participe passé conjugué avec avoir est passablement artificielle. La langue parlée la respecte très mal, et, même dans l'écrit, on trouve des manquements_) or the paper object of this thread. 

If the rule of the agreement between past participle and direct object were really natural, there wouldn't be all these "mistakes". 
To me it seems that the grammaticalization of the past participle after the verb _avoir_, as part of the verb, is becoming more or less established in spoken language. 

If two Presidents of the Republic can say _les conclusions que les ministres m'ont remis_ (François Mitterand) or _les démarches que nous avons aussitôt__ entrepris_ (Jacque Chiac) without problems, it seems that this is habitual. 



learnerr said:


> Ivenchuëli, pëhaps. Bät it mei teik ĸwait ë taim.



Also Russian language has vowel reduction but despite that you write in a traditional way. 

The past participle agrement matter (after the verb _avoir_) is not an orthographic/phonetic matter. 

Ciao


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> We, for example, never would say _Francesca l'ho vist*o* poco fa_, because one could think that there is a man called Francesca.


This is one reason why the ear might cringe, but this is not the only one. And, as you say, it is unlikely that French's ears may cringe for _this_ reason. The other reason is that some link is unobserved that someone expected to be observed; what to do, we think by links (as they say, "associations"), so the link issue is important for people, and those who have used to some way of linking may feel that it is distracting for their minds that they find those links away from sight. This may be a reason for a nice good cringe, too.


> If the rule of the agreement between past participle and direct object were really natural, there wouldn't be all these "mistakes".


As for speech, I agree. But the spoken language and the written language are not the same language; to put it hardly, the written language is not native to most people.


> Also Russian language has vowel reduction but despite that you write in a traditional way.


The difference between Russian and English is that Russian is a morphology-based language, while English is based on its history of words, on its history of borrowings in particular. In Russian what is conserved are not words, but morphemes, and not so much in time, but "in space" (among many words). So, traditional? No, I would not call our spelling traditional.
Bielarusians do without any such kinds of spelling, however.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> This may be a reason for a nice good cringe, too.



Yes, that's true. 
If a Frenchman born in XVIII century heard a sentence like this, "_Claire, je l'ai vue [vy] hier_", he would reply: "vous vouliez dire _je l'ai vue [vy:]_?!"  
Now French people don't feel the need to differentiate the pronunciation for gender in past participle of the verbs in _-er_ but two century ago they did. 



learnerr said:


> As for speech, I agree. But the spoken language and the written language are not the same language; to put it hardly, the written language is not native to most people.



Yes. This is why I opened this thread. I'd like to understand why for French people gender agreement of the past participle (after the verb _avoir_) is so important in written but not so much in spoken language. 



learnerr said:


> The difference between Russian and English is that Russian is a morphology-based language, while English is based on its history of words, on its history of borrowings in particular. In Russian what is conserved are not words, but morphemes, and not so much in time, but "in space" (among many words). So, traditional? No, I would not call our spelling traditional.



Yes (English had a lot of borrowings), but stressed and unstressed _a, e, o_ are written in the same manner but pronounced differently in Russian. It hasn't a phonemic orthography. But this is another topic.


----------



## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> Yes. This is why I opened this thread. I'd like to understand why for French gender agreement of the past participle (after the verb _avoi_) is so important in written but not so much in spoken language.


Well, so far there is my guess. Maybe natives will add to that; why they think their "ear" or "eye" may be "cringed".
By the way, in Russian there is a similar situation. "Не" and "ни" are often pronounced the same (even by those who differentiate the two sounds, and even in the stress position), yet in writing they are supposed to be different, and the difference between them has issues for logic and reasoning. I am not even talking (or am I?) about punctuation, which feature has no counterpart in the spoken language, because its purpose is not to separate words apart or group words together, like pauses do, (cases and verbal agreements do enough separation for all purposes) but to express the structure of the sentence.


> Yes (English had a lot of borrowings), but stressed and unstressed _a, e, o_ are written in the same manner but pronounced differently in Russian. It hasn't a phonemic orthography. But this is another topic.


I would say it is phonemic, but not phonetic; in any case, not traditional, given how much it has changed in the last four hundred years. Psychologically, we often find it hard to believe that the root sounds in "вода" and "лапта" are the same, when we have to ponder about it. And by the way something is written you usually know how it is pronounced (even if the stress is not specified). Quite a different topic, indeed.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> Nino did not address this part. He did not say that direct object agreement cannot make any sense to French people; he only explained that this sense is unused in the spoken language, and conjectured that the written language must or will adapt to the spoken language. Nothing about any sense being made.


I am afraid you didn't understand the argument. The point is that the original syntactic structure of a perfect sentence is not understood any more: _He<subject> has seed<verb> a man<object>_ was originally _He<subject> has<verb> a seen man<object>_ where _seen_ was an attributive adjective within the noun phrase _a seen man_. This has nothing to do with if it is a written or spoken language. DO-agreement is a left-over from an earlier development stage of Romance languages and that the logic behind it has become opaque to modern speakers.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> The point is that the original syntactic structure of a perfect sentence _is not understood any more_: _He<subject> has seed<verb> a man<object>_ was originally _He<subject> has<verb> a seen man<object>_ where _seen_ was an attributive adjective within the noun phrase _a seen man_.


Why do you think so? It is rather easy to guess once you know the rules (either by having them told to you or by reading written texts by yourself).
I think, if Russians would still have to form the past tense by using the verb _быть_, then the participle origin of the words like _несла_ would be transparent to us as well.


> This has nothing to do with if it is a written or spoken language.


This has everything to do with it as well, because in principle the written language is one language and the spoken language is another language. In practice, one of the questions is whether French share this attitude...


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> ....We, for example, never would say _Francesca l'ho vist*o* poco fa_, because one could think that there is a man called Francesca.  ...


 This may be explained, at least partially, by the pronoun_ l' _before _ho_, i.e. there is no difference between _la ho_ and _lo ho_ so the participle tends to maintain the gender. 

However, this doesn't seem to me a quite strong reason. If in cases like "ho visto Francesca" and "Francesca che ho visto" the agreement is not required (nobody thinks of a man called Francesca ) then I can imagine the disappearance of the agreement also in case of "Francesca l'ho vista" in the future. In other words, the agreement here could be seen or "felt" as an "unnecessary exception".


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> This has everything to do with it as well, because in principle the written language is one language and the spoken language is another language. In practice, Nino does not share this attitude. The question is whether French do...



Once people made past participle agreement also when the direct object was placed after the verb _habere _in spoken language (as we *always* do just now with _essere/ser + past participle_ in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). 

_Habeo bell*a* puell*a* vist*a* _(attributive adjective of the direct object) --> _ho vist*o*_ (part of the verb) _una bella ragazza, hé vist*o* una mujer guapa, j'ai v*u* une belle fille _

The fact is that this evolution included in Spanish and Portuguese all cases where there is a direct object before the verb and in Italian all these cases unless there is a third person object pronoun before the verb. 
Italian, Spanish and Portuguese regulators didn't pretend to preserve a rule that is not used in spoken language. 
In French there is a hiatus between written and spoken form. Percentages of non agreement are too high to be considered "mistakes" (but one can do so, accusing the school). 



francisgranada said:


> This may be explained, at least partially, by the pronoun_ l' _before _ho_, i.e. there is no difference between _la ho_ and _lo ho_ so the participle tends to maintain the gender.



Hi Francis. 
But it doesn't explain why one say _le ho viste_ and _li ho visti_.  



francisgranada said:


> then I can imagine the disappearance of the agreement also in case of "Francesca l'ho vista" in the future



It could be so, but nowdays these "mistakes" are very rare.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> Why do you think so?


No modern speaker would understand _J'ai vu un homme_ and _J'ai un homme vu_ as meaning the same thing. But that is the historical reason why this agreement rule exists. It has already been weakened by reducing it to cases where the object precedes the verb (which corresponds to the original word order) and it is not unreasonable to expect it to weaken further.


----------



## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> Percentages of non agreement are too high to be considered "mistakes" (but one can do so, accusing the school).


Let me voice the argument once again, and I "уползаю восвояси" (an ironic way to say, "I go away from that", "I return to my teapot", "I stop disturbing", "I stop beating the horse"). Percentages alone are not an argument when talking about writing. For example, if _most_ Russians do not care to put commas rightly, then it means that _most_ Russians do mistakes of punctuation. A poorly punctuated text simply makes a nuisance (and an additional burden, especially when silly or sometimes even non-silly ambiguities are made) to read. As for how what French do qualifies, I don't know because, I have not been in a French's shoes, but the percentages alone do not convince of anything.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> No modern speaker would understand _J'ai vu un homme_ and _J'ai un homme vu_ as meaning the same thing.



That's right. 
_Ho appena pescato un pesce = I've just caught a fish__ 
Ho un pesce appena pescato = I've (I own) a fish that was caught (by someone) just now_


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> .... But it doesn't explain why one say _le ho viste_ and _li ho visti_.


Hai ragione . But maybe it explains partially, at least in the sense that it _reinforces _the conservation of the agreement in case of pers. pronouns. It would be "weird" or spontanousely felt "illogical" to maintain the agreement in singular and not in plural ...



> I could well agree with my friend that the word "blue" should be taken to mean "green" as well, but that would make life harder, because I would always understand him wrong at first, and so would he.


 That's why it normally doesn't happen, i.e. the _others _would not understand those who say blue meaning green. In other words there is not a "wide" consensus on it. However, if for some reasons blue meaning green were accepted by the "majority" then it could work even if it seems absurd ...


----------



## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> Hai ragione . But maybe it explains partially, at least in the sense that it _reinforces _the conservation of the agreement in case of pers. pronouns.



It could be so also because the third person personal pronouns are the only ones that have a masculine and a feminine form.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> No modern speaker would understand _J'ai vu un homme_ and _J'ai un homme vu_ as meaning the same thing.


That much is true. But if you know that _avoir_ is about having, then the guess that in the past tense someone has something which is come appears easy enough, I suppose. You don't need to know the details of the history or of the wordings, that were used in the past, to imagine that the had thing thing is logical to agree with the participle (what thing do I have? a seen thing), it's on the level of ideas, not words.

Add to that that people know very well that _vu_ or _venu_ are also participles, that when the verb is going to talk about the subject itself rather than the subject's change of experience or static properties, then the verb _être_ is used, that with _être_ the subject agreement is used; the idea of object agreement appears from all that material rather urgently.


----------



## learnerr

francisgranada said:


> That's why it normally doesn't happen, i.e. the _others _would not understand those who say blue meaning green. In other words there is not a "wide" consensus on it. However, if for some reasons blue meaning green were accepted by the "majority" then it could work even if it seems absurd ...


I think you're paying attention to the wrong details (or, rather, I made my example wrong and distracting). The point is not that it looks absurd to us (being absurd is rather connected with my wish of being theatrical), the point is that my misunderstanding him does not depend on my agreement with him. I cannot control my understanding, it happens alongside my will.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> That much is true. But if you know that _avoir_ is about having, then the guess that the past tense someone has something which goes easy enough, I suppose. You don't need to know the details to imagine that the had thing thing is logical to agree with the participle (what thing do I have? a seen thing), it's on the level of ideas, not words.





Nino83 said:


> _Ho appena pescato un pesce = I've just caught a fish__
> Ho un pesce appena pescato = I've (I own) a fish that was caught (by someone) just now_



The meaning is really different. 
In the first case the verb _avere_ is a mere tense indicator and it hasn't any semantic meaning. The real verb is _catch_. 
In the second case the verb _avere_ means possession. _Caught_ in this case is an adjective. 

_Ho appena pescato alcuni pesci/ho alcuni pesc*i* appena pescat*i*_. 

These two structures are really different.


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> These two structures are really different.


Have I ever said they are the same?


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> Percentages alone are not an argument when talking about writing.


Higher registers often tend to be more conservative with respect to more complex grammatical structures then lower one. This isn't intrinsically related to _written _vs. _spoken_ language. The same person may say _the man who*m* I saw _in a solemn speech and _the man who I saw _an hour later with this friends in the pub.


----------



## Nino83

learnerr said:


> Have I ever said they are the same?



If a native speaker didn't study the historical evolution of the past participle he wouldn't connect these two structures.


----------



## learnerr

berndf said:
			
		

> Higher registers often tend to be more conservative with respect to more  complex grammatical structures then lower one. This isn't intrinsically  related to _written _vs. _spoken_ language. The same person may say _the man who*m* I saw _in a solemn speech and _the man who I saw _an hour later with this friends in the pub.


Of course, this is a complicated story with many ends... That the story is more complicated that it may appear was basically what I was trying to say in different manners and in relation to different things.


----------



## berndf

learnerr said:


> Have I ever said they are the same?


Your argument in #62 stands and falls with the assumption that the structural and semantic similarity is still present in people's intuitive perception. But this is not the case. The _have_-perfect exists in practically all Western-European languages, whether Romance or Germanic. I haven't met anyone who has ever intuitive guesses the original semantics behind the verb form.


----------



## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> If a native speaker didn't study the historical evolution of the past participle he wouldn't connect these two structures.


Your opinion is one important, of course; as for me, someone from a Northern non-Romance country, I first wondered why French do not use _être_ with all their verbs of past tense, but use _avoir_, then quickly came to the feeling that the word after _avoir_ (we were said it was called a participle, but I did not understand this term at that time, so it missed my mind) must agree with the object, and only then learned, that sometimes it does. That was before I knew anything about any other foreign languages; certainly, we were not taught any history of French. Native Romance do not wonder about such things habitual for them, of course; but still, it must be very easy for them to understand the explanation once they receive it, because it is intuitive, and then the agreement makes a very certain sense.


berndf said:


> Your argument in #62 stands and falls with the  assumption that the structural and semantic similarity is still present  in people's intuitive perception. But this is not the case. The _have_-perfect  exists in practically all Western-European languages, whether Romance  or Germanic. I haven't met anyone who has ever intuitive guesses the  original semantics behind the verb form.


Just a remark: _they don't_ and _they can't_ are different things. The answer does not appear terribly  complicated or non-intuitive once someone starts consciously wondering without a prejudice; especially in a language  where you can directly and sensually compare the past tense forms with  the regular participles and the thing-driving past tense (_être_) with the quality-of-things-driving past tense (_avoir_).  Language speaking is not about the process of mechanically expanding  syntax trees or whatever; language speaking is about making a creative  work.


----------



## Nino83

learnerr said:


> we were not taught any history of French. Native Romance do not wonder about such things habitual for them, of course; but still, it must be very easy for them to understand the explanation once they receive it, because it is intuitive, and then the agreement makes a very certain sense.



Yes. The problem is that at school we don't study the history of the past participle agreement. Only who studies linguistics or who (like me) reads something for curiosity, knows the history of the language. 



learnerr said:


> Just a remark: _they don't_ and _they can't_ are different things. The answer does not appear terribly  complicated or non-intuitive once someone starts consciously wondering without a prejudice;



Yes, if it were taught at school, but it doesn't.


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> Yes. The problem is that at school we don't study the history of the past participle agreement. Only who studies linguistics or who (like me) reads something for curiosity, knows the history of the language.


Study by rite, er?  In principle, it is enough, I suppose, just to say (pay the students' attention to the fact that is hardly foreign for them) that this word after _essere_/_être_ or _avere_/_avoir_ is a participle; all that is important about the rest is guessed from the semantics of these two verbs and the modes of using the corresponding forms of the past tense.

I wonder whether people who do not study history of language, but have the custom of reading (not books about linguistics, but anything else) intuite something like that (not the real history, but the most important bits) which makes agreement logical for them, when they start to wonder at what they have read and also what they have developed a habit to (after all, reading and writing is a matter of habit just like talking is). If they don't, then there is indeed no reason for a cringe, except their  habit (habit being an excuse, though, because we do not control our  habits...). Italians don't need to start actively wondering, of course, because they have a simpler explanation at hand: read and write as _they_ talk (_they_ being radio dictors, school teachers and who else who talks standard Italian speech rather than the local speech).


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> Italians don't need to start actively wondering, of course, because they have a simpler explanation at hand: read and write as _they_ talk (_they_ being radio dictors, school teachers and who else who talks standard Italian speech rather than the local speech).



Italians, Spanish, Portuguese.  
The fact is that one firstly learns to speak and only when is 6 years old he starts to write. 
If there's no difference between spoken and written customs, there's no problem but if it isn't so, some problems arise. 
You study past participle agreement at school but when you go out also baccalaureates agree only 37 times out of 100, so you hear it and keep on speaking as ever. The hiatus is formed. 
Now you can mantain this hiatus or not. This seems to be a political matter. 
Past participle agreement after _avoir_ with the preceeding direct object is an historical feature that is little used (and respected) in current spoken language. 
So you can decide to sanction it in writings, considering it a mistake, or to follow the evolution of the language, making it facultative in those cases in which the agreement is less used in speech. 

It seems that this choice is based on subjective positions.  

Ciao


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## Nanon

learnerr said:


> I first wondered why French do not use _être_ with all their verbs of past tense, but use _avoir_, then quickly came to the feeling that the word after _avoir_ (we were said it was called a participle, but I did not understand this term at that time, so it missed my mind) must agree with the object, and only then learned, that sometimes it does.
> (...)
> Native Romance do not wonder about such things habitual for them, of course; but still, it must be very easy for them to understand the explanation once they receive it, because it is intuitive, and then the agreement makes a very certain sense.


Why not using _être _always? Possibly because _être _is already used for the passive voice.
In native children, learning past participle agreement is not really intuitive. What is taught at school is a rule, not a linguistic explanation. The agreement may make sense... with adulthood.



Nino83 said:


> I'd like to understand why for French people gender agreement of the past participle (after the verb _avoir_) is so important in written but not so much in spoken language.


Gender and number agreeement of the past participle is not more or less important than, for instance, double negation, the omission of which (i.e. using only _pas_) is still regarded as a mistake in writing, though it is widespread in speech. The speech vs writing frontier is important culturally. There are several historical, sociological, political... explanations to this. Yet there is a slight difference between omitting the _ne _part of the negation and not making the past participle agree. The double negation obeys to a very simple rule that is known to every native speaker. Omitting _ne _is ruled by the principle of economy... or, in value judgement terms, omitting _ne _is plain laziness . But past participle agreements obeys to more complex rules. The underlying message of people who don't make the agreement is that they do not feel the need to waste energy on this, and/or they want to focus on more important matters. Whether they take a revenge on the school system is a matter of psychology .

I hope I will not infringe too many rules of this forum by quoting from Clément Marot's _Épigrammes _(CIX):


> Faut dire en parolles parfaictes:
> Dieu en ce monde les a faictes;
> Et ne fault point dire en effect:
> Dieu en ce monde les a faict.
> Ne nous a faict pareillement,
> Mais nous a faictz tout rondement.
> L'italien, dont la faconde
> Passe les vulgaires du monde,
> Son langage a sinsi basty
> En disant: Dio noi a fatti.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> In principle, it is enough, I suppose, just to say (pay the students' attention to the fact that is hardly foreign for them) that this word after _essere_/_être_ or _avere_/_avoir_ is a participle; all that is important about the rest is guessed from the semantics of these two verbs and the modes of using the corresponding forms of the past tense.


The _être_-perfect essentially kept its original semantics: The participle functions as a predicate adjective predicating the subject. The agreement rules of the _avoir_-perfect essentially still correspond to the semantics where the participle has a passive meaning attributing the object while the modern semantic it that the main verb predicates the subject having obtained an active voice meaning. The sentence j'ai vu l'home makes an assertion but me having seen the man while j'ai un homme vu makes only an assertion about the man being seen by someone, not necessarily by me.  This is an important change in meaning that obscures the reason behind the agreement rule whereas the semantics behind the agreement rules of the _être_-perfect are still intact.


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> The fact is that one firstly learns to speak and only when is 6 years old he starts to write.


Right, but the difference is mostly that 6-years olds are less open-minded, have more prejudice and less time for learning language.


> If there's no difference between spoken and written customs, there's no problem but if it isn't so, some problems arise.


There is no life without problems.  Rephrasing: (I don't know whether you have this saying, and it sounds very English to me, but I don't know where it came from): "if you do not have problems, that means you are already dead". 


> It seems that this choice is based on subjective positions.


Agree exactly (who might ever expect that anything at all in language is not based on subjective positions? everything is), but subjective positions, just like objective positions, are no less a matter of exploring than a matter of setting at will; most things cannot be set. It is not purely an issue for a wilful decision.
Even granted that "in native children, learning past participle agreement is not really intuitive".


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> The _être_-perfect essentially kept its original semantics: The participle functions as a predicate adjective predicating the subject. The agreement rules of the _avoir_-perfect essentially still correspond to the semantics where the participle has a passive meaning attributing the object while the modern semantic it that the main verb predicates the subject having obtained an active voice meaning.


Why can't a sentence have this attribution and this predication both at once? Unrolling this situation with the past tense, indeed, requires a step of reasoning, but this step appears necessary when you see that the word is a participle and it agrees with the object, therefore describes the handled object (without "attributing" it in the technical sense, of course); knowing about the other assertion which is main in the sentence, you immediately make the conclusion that there are two different assertions side by side.


> The sentence j'ai vu l'home makes an assertion but me having seen the man while j'ai un homme vu makes only an assertion about the man being seen by someone, not necessarily by me.  This is an important change in meaning that obscures the reason behind the agreement rule whereas the semantics behind the agreement rules of the _être_-perfect are still intact.


I admit, what possibly helped me was that I did not know by heart what the term "passive" meant, nor cared for that (these distinctions between well-defined and not well-defined passive meaning feel non-important unless someone has learned them very well in school). The things were handled, that was enough to know. By whom? Easiest to suppose, by someone who was just mentioned, – disregarding all deduçable rules of syntax for this occasion, because they are not the main thing.


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## berndf

It can have but it doesn't.


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## berndf

No normal person would ever think of "have" in "I have seen a man" to be anything but a mere tense/aspect marker. Only complete nutters like us in this forum would ever ask "why"... That's what my wife just confirmed.


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## Nino83

Nanon said:


> I hope I will not infringe too many rules of this forum by quoting from Clément Marot's _Épigrammes _(CIX)



Very long time ago  



learnerr said:


> Right, but the difference is mostly that  6-years olds are less open-minded, have more prejudice and less time for  learning language.



Yes, but this rule is not so much respected by older and educated people too, in speech. 

So in writing there is a mandatory agreement while in speech there is, _de facto_, a facultative agreement (according to many French linguists). 

I've no problem with this even if I don't understand why many French grammarians get annoyed for the great amount of "mistakes" when they know that there are different rules in spoken language. 

It seems that there would be two solutions. To remove this hiatus (modifying the rules or improving education) or to accept this hiatus without complaining or, third solution, to keep complaining  

Ciao


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## Nanon

No normal person... Well, maybe children would .


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## myšlenka

Nino83 said:


> Why French regulators haven't accepted this request?


 Most of the debate in this forum seems to be over with respect to this topic, but I would just like to add a somewhat new perspective. Some linguists regard the object agreement rule in French as a _grammatical virus_, meaning that object agreement is not the result of grammar itself (grammar as a cognitive capacity) but rather the result of extra-grammatical factors. Supporting evidence for this is the fact that you have to teach this rules explicitly. Moreover, the rule is not consistent with respect to this (also from a synchronic point of view) so they seem kind of _ad hoc_ and artifical, which confirms the feeling I had about it when I first started learning French. A typical feature of viral constructions is that they are typically prestige constructions. This is probably why the French want to keep it


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## learnerr

myšlenka said:


> Some linguists regard the object agreement rule in French as a _grammatical virus_,  meaning that object agreement is not the result of grammar itself  (grammar as a cognitive capacity) but rather the result of  extra-grammatical factors.


Debatable. See: if you learn the written language the natural way (like foreigners may do sometimes, and like some native children may do), then this kind of rule arises as a natural result of the "cognitive ability" to understand language and thought; but it is different when a person has no inclination to do that. So, it's like Russians trying to get anyone in the country to speak Russian, or any other people trying to get strangers to speak the state language: for some, who spoke other languages in childhood, the rules of the spoken language around are indeed not a result of the grammar as their "cognitive ability", but something foreign, just the same.


> Supporting evidence for this is the fact that you have to teach this rules explicitly.


This supports the same point: the written language is not a native one, and often is not even close to a native one. Yes, you have to teach writing and reading explicitly. In the case of French, provide with spelling dictionaries, probably teach some good syntax, and so on.


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## berndf

myšlenka said:


> Most of the debate in this forum seems to be over with respect to this topic, but I would just like to add a somewhat new perspective. Some linguists regard the object agreement rule in French as a _grammatical virus_, meaning that object agreement is not the result of grammar itself (grammar as a cognitive capacity) but rather the result of extra-grammatical factors. Supporting evidence for this is the fact that you have to teach this rules explicitly. Moreover, the rule is not consistent with respect to this (also from a synchronic point of view) so they seem kind of _ad hoc_ and artifical, which confirms the feeling I had about it when I first started learning French. A typical feature of viral constructions is that they are typically prestige constructions. This is probably why the French want to keep it


I hope you agree that *dia*chronically, these agreement rules are the left-overs of a once completely logical syntactic structure. *Syn*chronically, I agree with you that these rules are as urgently needed as a hole in your head. But it is their (the French speaking community) choice whether say want to keep them or not. In Yiddish would call this _Goyim Naches_.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> *Syn*chronically, I agree with you that these rules are as urgently needed as a hole in your head.


Then, let's be practical. What rules would you suggest in return? This is _the first question_. _The second question_: how would you explain to people why what they read in books _systematically_ follows a different pattern than what they are taught in schools? Did those people in the past not write in French? It's all psychology, like everything else in life that we do.
My comment is that the suggestions to abolish their system are just as extra-linguistical as the suggestions to keep it. I personally do not suggest either, though.


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## CapnPrep

learnerr said:


> _The second question_: how would you explain to people why what they read in books _systematically_  follows a different pattern than what they are taught in schools? Did  those people in the past not write in French?


All you have to say  is "oh yes, the orthography was reformed since those books were  written". If we can judge by past reforms, I think French speakers are  able to cope with this psychologically


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> What rules would you suggest in return?


E.g. no participle agreement with the _avoir_-perfect at all.


learnerr said:


> how would you explain to people why what they read in books _systematically_ follows a different pattern than what they are taught in schools?


You tell them "This is old (pre-reform) usage". These things go surprisingly fast. In German they replaced all the complicated rules when to use "ß" and when to use "ss" with a simple rule appropriate for modern phonology ("ß" follow a long vowel, "ss" follows a short vowel). The old rules were only understandable when you knew that 500 years ago "ß" and "ss" represented different sounds and the rules had to be taught simply as a set of rules without rationale. At the time, 1996, all the people complained how dreadful this all was and predicted that culture would go down the grain and some publishers and newspapers refused to adapt their usage to the new rules. Today, no-one ever talks about that any more and those publishers have quietly given up to uphold the old spelling. The fact that libraries are full of books published before 1996 doesn't keep the discussion alive and does not pose any practical problems.

Also, practically speaking, the frequency of changes necessary, if you wanted to abolish all agreement rules for the _avoir_-perfect is probably less than the average typo rate and people would hardly notice.

EDIT: Crossed with #86.


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## myšlenka

learnerr said:


> See: if you learn the written language the natural way (like foreigners may do sometimes, and like some native children may do), then this kind of rule arises as a natural result of the "cognitive ability" to understand language and thought; but it is different when a person has no inclination to do that


 It's not really a topic in this thread but what is the _natural_ way to learn written language? Are there any unnatural ways?



berndf said:


> I hope you agree that *dia*chronically, these agreement rules are the left-overs of a once completely logical syntactic structure. *Syn*chronically, I agree with you that these rules are as urgently needed as a hole in your head. But it is their (the French speaking community) choice whether say want to keep them or not. In Yiddish would call this _Goyim Naches_.


Yes, I don't question the origin of French object agreement and that it used to be a coherent system 
I was thinking more about the fact that there are constructions (i.e. causatives) that meet the structural requirements for object agreement but where object agreement is banned because _le Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française_ decided that the participle should remain invariable.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> My comment is that the suggestions to abolish their system are just as extra-linguistical as the suggestions to keep it. I personally do not suggest either, though.



As berndf said, there's no need to abolish the entire system. 
In order to put the written language near to the spoken one again it would be sufficient to abolish past participle agreement with _avoir_ (or to make it facultative), also retaining this agreement with third person direct object pronouns (which still has high percentages in spoken language). 
Also Italian and Spanish people, when read ancient books, find more cases of past participle agreement than in contemporary books. It's not a big problem.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> E.g. no participle agreement with the _avoir_-perfect at all.


While retaining participle agreement with _être_? You and Nino have already proposed two different variants of change. Which shows that what the change may be is not as clear as sky; variants of reform would feel perplexing. I think that no variant of change is evident and makes that kind of _aha_-effect that makes people happy with a new decision. Eventually, this is what is important: that some system bereaves people of doubt and makes them happy when conversing with some set of rules.


> You tell them "This is old (pre-reform) usage". These things go surprisingly fast.


That's right. It is again psychological. Whether people feel something as a huge or minor difference (that mostly proceeds from the question, 'with what it may be linked, how much influence it has and where lies its influence?'), whether people feel the need in a change _per se_, without the context of people making mistakes, whether people feel that something has changed and they have to live in a new way, etc. For example, who knows whether the 1918 spelling reform of Russian would succeed if the people did not set new values for their lives (but anyway, old books had to be respelt, otherwise no way), but the more minor in its effect reform of 1960s failed, maybe exactly because the change was not perceived to be well connected with the rest of spelling rules and issues, or was not felt to be driven by an isolated attractive principle. In English, minor changes to orthography took place, but no major one did.


> Also, practically speaking, the frequency of changes necessary, if you wanted to abolish all agreement rules for the _avoir_-perfect is probably less than the average typo rate and people would hardly notice.


When people don't notice, you have nothing to explain, but when people do notice, then they do not care whether the change is noticeable, and you have to bring other arguments.  And you cannot ensure a reform without making people notice.


myšlenka said:


> It's not really a topic in this thread but what is the _natural_ way to learn written language? Are there any unnatural ways?


Just like a spoken language or a sign language is learnt (if someone happens to be dumb or converses a lot with dumb people, especially since young age). By reading words and making for oneself a picture of the language they are written in.


CapnPrep said:


> If we can judge by past reforms, I think French speakers are  able to cope with this psychologically


Anyone is, eventually. 

One point that has not been mentioned is that the written rules make no obstruction for anyone. In other words, if a tech guy in her blog wants to spell the way she wants, then nobody is obstructing her. What any rules affect is the kind of language that is specially accepted, whenever one needs to decide. So, high rate of mistakes is not much of an issue. If people wish to write the way they want, then it is their business entirely.


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## myšlenka

learnerr said:


> Just like a spoken language or a sign language is learnt (if someone happens to be dumb or converses a lot with dumb people, especially since young age). By reading words and making for oneself a picture of the language they are written in.


The natural way to learn written language is the same as for spoken/signed language? That's interesting because you also say that:


learnerr said:


> [...] the written language is not a native one, and often is not even close to a native one. Yes, you have to teach writing and reading explicitly.


 So, if writing has to be taught explicitly (which is the natural way according to what you've said so far), would speaking/signing also have to be taught explicitly?


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> While retaining participle agreement with _être_?



Yes, as it is in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. If people pronounce it why shouldn't they write it? 



learnerr said:


> You and Nino have already proposed two different variants of change. Which shows that what the change may be is not as clear as sky; variants of reform would feel perplexing.



It's simple. Spoken language shows an historical trend. There is no need to abolish the system with the verb _avoir_. Making it not mandatory would be sufficient. As it was in other sister languages. French writers will decide, in everyday practise, if they really need to make agreement in those cases in which it will be facultative. 

I'm not complaining about the difficulty of the past participle agreement (in Italian language, for example, there are more past participle agreements with pronominal verbs, as in_ Maria si è lavata i capelli, Marie s'est lavé ses cheveux, Marco e Francesco si sono telefonati, Marc et François se sont téléphoné_) but some French linguists say that this is a difficult challenge for both native and foreign students. 
I can understand that foreign students can have some difficulty but if also native students have difficulties, there is a problem. 

Ciao


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## learnerr

myšlenka said:


> So, if writing has to be taught explicitly (which is the natural way  according to what you've said so far), would speaking/signing also have  to be taught explicitly?


If that is not how the word is used in English, then my usage of the word was mistaken. 
I used the word "natural" merely as a label, not to qualify anything. The "natural" way and the "most used" way were not the same thing.


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## Nanon

Nino83 said:


> I'm not complaining about the difficulty of the past participle agreement (in Italian language, for example, there are more past participle agreements with pronominal verbs, as in_ Maria si è lavata i capelli, Marie s'est lavé ses cheveux, Marco e Francesco si sono telefonati, Marc et François se sont téléphoné_) but some French linguists say that this is a difficult challenge for both native and foreign students.
> I can understand that foreign students can have some difficulty but if also native students have difficulties, there is a problem.


There is a problem - also for natives, since that reflects in speech - if you abolish _all _agreements of past participles with pronominal verbs, cf. FR _elle s'est mise à travailler _[miz] / _elle s'est mis une fleur dans les cheveux_ [mi]. This is one of the reasons why nobody dares take action .


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## Nino83

Hi Nanon 

I don't suggest abolishing past participle agreements in pronominal verbs but (as proposed by AIROE) rendering facultative some agreements after the auxiliar verb _avoir_.  

P.S. 

A little summary 

Elle s'est lavé*e*/Lei si è lavat*a* --> S = DO
Elle s'est lavé ses cheveux/Lei si è lavat*a* i capelli --> DO after the verb
Elles se sont parlé/Loro si sono parlat*e* --> IO (speak to each other) 
Elle se les est lavé*es*, les mains/Lei se le è lavat*e* le mani --> DO before the verb (personal pronoun) 
Elle s'est fiancé*e* avec lui/Lei si è fidanzat*a* con lui --> IO after the verb 

In French past participle agrees with DO placed before the verb. So in second and third phrase there's no agreement. 
Italian rule is simpler. Past participle agrees always with the subject unless there is a DO personal pronoun (only for third person personal pronouns) before the verb (that is the same rule for agreement with verb _avere_). 

In Spanish and Portuguese there's no agreement with pronominal verbs. 
Ella se había lavado/Ellas se habían hablado. Ela tinha-se lavado/Elas tinham-se falado.


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## learnerr

One of the things that I disagree with is this one:


Nino83 said:


> I can understand that foreign students can have some difficulty but if also native students have difficulties, there is a problem.


Why? That people make mistakes of agreement or other spelling/grammar mistakes does not yet mean _they_ have any problem.
Also, one important difference between an Italian mind and a French mind is (must be) that for French difficult spelling of their language is something they are used to; one change of a disputable nature (good for you you have a strict enough criterion, that of ensuring closer correspondence between written and spoken language, but what is a criterion for some may be arbitrary for others) does not make deep difference for the ways how people have to approach to the language.
There is no if-then here. Both strategies, keeping and reforming, are illogical and not implied by any strict knowledge.


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## berndf

learnerr said:


> While retaining participle agreement with _être_?


Sure, because the _être_-perfect doesn't pose a problem. The agreement-rule (rule, not rules!) is simple, consistent with the adjective agreement rules and the original reason (a participle is declined like an adjective) is still transparent. Even more so, _Elle est endormi*e*_ can still be understood as a passé composé (_she has fallen asleep_) or as copula+predicative adjective (_she is asleep_). Abolishing the agreement rule for one but not for the other interpretation would make grammar more difficult, not easier.



learnerr said:


> Both strategies, keeping and reforming, are illogical and not implied by any strict knowledge.


Complete abolition of agreement rule with the _avoir_-perfect is completely logical. You might not like the logic, but it exists and is simple.


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## learnerr

berndf said:


> Sure, because the _être_-perfect doesn't pose a problem. The  agreement-rule (rule, not rules!) is simple, consistent with the  adjective agreement rules and the original reason (a participle is  declined like an adjective) is still transparent. Even more so, _Elle est endormi*e*_ can still be understood as a passé composé (_she has fallen asleep_) or as copula+predicative adjective (_she is asleep_). Abolishing the agreement rule for one but not for the other interpretation would make grammar more difficult, not easier.


Per examples that Nanon provided in #94, the être rule renders itself difficult as well when the feminine past participle sounds the same as the masculine one, and there is a chance to confuse a reflexive intransitive verb with a reflexive transitive verb. In addition, there is a problem of number, apart from gender. Yes, it is intricate enough (as your example of a link between different kinds of phrase demonstrates, too), and leaves a room for doubt about any possible committee decision. Doubt -> worry -> unhappiness. 


berndf said:


> Complete abolition of agreement rule with the _avoir_-perfect is completely logical. You might not like the logic, but it exists and is simple.


In such case, there are other logics that tell otherwise.  Some logics say that no change is what is completely logical. Another logic compelled Nino to say that a change is needed, but different than yours (retain in the case of object pronouns, make "facultative" in the case of a noun in preposition to the verb) Among logics of change, some would suggest to change the normative language altogether, and others would suggest to make variants of the normative language "facultative" in this respect. All is a matter of what is liked initially.


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## myšlenka

learnerr said:


> Both strategies, keeping and reforming, are illogical and not implied by any strict knowledge.





learnerr said:


> In such case, there are other logics that tell otherwise.


 I am not sure what you mean by this.... you are very bombastic about what is logical and what isn't, and then you turn into a relativist 

However, if you have read what has been written so far, you'll see that _être_-agreement makes sense (adjectives behave the same way) so it's easy to learn. Object agreement in past participles on the other hand makes no sense at all in the modern language because it's idiosyncratic to a large extent. There is simply no good reason to keep it apart from... well, tradition.


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## learnerr

myšlenka said:


> I am not sure what you mean by this.... you are very bombastic about what is logical and what isn't, and then you turn into a relativist


That depends on what one means by logic. If by existence of logic for one's position one means that there is undisputable knowledge, which cannot be taken as false or not workable, but yet leads unequivocally, without any additional assumptions, to the result, then no position of the mentioned ones is logical. If by existence of logic one means that there is a nice argument which stems from an assumption taken at random, then, for example, berndf's and Nino's positions are both logical, even if they are different. The two citations of mine reflect the same position said by different words.


myšlenka said:


> However, if you have read what has been written so far, you'll see that _être_-agreement makes sense (adjectives behave the same way) so it's easy to learn.


Then, why in case of the transitive reflexive verbs the participle is left unchanged? You could say it does not behave in such case like an adjective, but this is again an abstract description of reason which is no better and no worse than the historical one about the participles with _avoir_. Also, why correct participles and not touch adjectives?
Also, maybe it is better, for example to get rid of the marker of the plural number in participles and adjectives? But this, by the way, again has its problem, namely liaison that sometimes occurs.


myšlenka said:


> There is simply no good reason to keep it apart from... well, tradition.


Back to logic. That there is no reason at all is not correct. I can see five:
1. Ease of making no change. You don't need to follow the rules unless you want to; but when you want, then the rules should be something that feels deserving your will. And what feels deserving your attention is what has been felt deserving by the rest of the society so far. No real problem for anybody.
2. No possible change appears completely self-evident; there are variations of decision, that kill one another in the manner: if this change is possible, then why not instead take that?
3. Some people do pronounce the participles according to the gender as in the normative language (Nino addressed this point by proposing a part of the rule for _avoir_-agreement to be facultative, but well, while the rule is not, the actual usage is facultative now too, right?).
4. Pointlessness: grammar remains complex anyway. So, what for?
5. The one mentioned by you: written literary tradition.

Those are all reasons that may be or not be worth considering, depending on what you think is valuable; there is no logic that could set these reasons good or bad unequivocally. I personally guess that French in fact follow the first reason so far, supported by the second and the fourth. Tradition is a thing that is easily given up, I don't think it is factually a reason for anything, even if it is worthy consideration.

My position: if you guys were arguing against any change, then I would argue for a change. But since you are arguing for changes, then I am arguing against any change.


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> Per examples that Nanon provided in #94, the être rule renders itself difficult as well when the feminine past participle sounds the same as the masculine one, and there is a chance to confuse a reflexive intransitive verb with a reflexive transitive verb.



I'm sorry but you're confunding different things. 

a) When berndf and I speak about agreement with verb _être_, we are speaking about _active non pronominal intransitive verbs_ and _passive form of transitive verbs_. In these cases the rule is one in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese (in these two only for the passive form, because for the active form, only auxiliar _habere_ is used). Past participle agrees with the subject. The same rule used for adjectives. 

_*Marco e Roberta* sono andat*i* a Parigi/*Marc et Roberta* sont allé*s* à Paris_. 
_*Le mele* sono state mess*e* sul tavolo/*Les pommes* ont été mis*es* sur le table._ 

b) With the verb _avoir_, past participle agrees with the DO that preceedes the verb. 

c) With pronominal verbs, the examples made by Nanon, past participle agrees with the DO that preceedes the verb (_elle s'est mise à travailler _[miz] / _elle s'est mis une fleur dans les cheveux_ [mi]). In these cases the verb _mettre_ is always transitive but in the first case the DO is the pronoun _se_ while in the second one the DO is _les cheveux_ (and there is not agreement because in the second case the DO is placed after the verb). 

Said that, we are not discussing about _abolition_ of the past participle agreement with pronominal verbs. 

AIROE, during the last spelling reform, suggested rendering facultative some agreements after the auxiliar verb _avoir_. 
I'm only saying that, for me, this change is logic because in spoken language agreement is not mandatory and it's not very common (as said by many French linguists). 



> Why? That people make mistakes of agreement or other spelling/grammar mistakes does not yet mean _they_ have any problem.



France is one of the most developed countries in the world with very low rates of illiteracy (CIA World Factbook says that the rate is 1%, as in Italy, Germany, UK and so on) so it is really difficult to think that people make a such large amount of mistakes in spoken language. 

Simply past participle agreement is no longer so important as it was in the past (after verb _avoir_).


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## learnerr

Nino83 said:


> a) When I and berndf speak about agreement with verb _être_, we are speaking about _active non pronominal intransitive verbs_ and _passive form of transitive verbs_. In these cases the rule is one in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese (in these two only for the passive form, because for the active form, only auxiliar _habere_ is used). Past participle agrees with the subject. The same rule used for adjectives.


Okay. Taken out of scene.


> c) With pronominal verbs, the examples made by Nanon, past participle agrees with the DO that preceedes the verb (_elle s'est mise à travailler _[miz] / _elle s'est mis une fleur dans les cheveux_ [mi]). In these cases the verb _mettre_ is always transitive but in the first case the DO is the pronoun _se_ while in the second one the DO is _les cheveux_ (and there is not agreement because in the second case the DO is placed after the verb).


Sorry. Quite difficult to follow with regular verbs, isn't it?


> Said that, we are not discussing about _abolition_ of the past participle agreement after with pronominal verbs.


Different people are discussing different things, as far as I can see.


> I'm only saying that, for me, this change is logic because in spoken language agreement is not mandatory and it's not very common.


I am very okay with that. The conclusion is logical, but the premise may be or not be considered important for taking action.


> France is one of the most developed countries in the world with very low rates of illiteracy (CIA World Factbook says that the rate is 1%, as in Italy, Germany, UK, ) so it really difficult to think that people make a such large amount of mistakes in spoken language.


There are many ways to deal with that. One could change rules. Or one could simply not think in that way.

I seem to be repeating myself partly already, so I think I stop.
Ciao


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## Nino83

learnerr said:


> There are many ways to deal with that. One could change rules. Or one could simply not think in that way.



Yes. One may think that spoken and written language can (or must) have different rules (as _l'Académie Française_ does) or not (as _AIROE_ does). 

Ciao


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## myšlenka

learnerr said:


> That depends on what one means by logic. If by existence of logic for one's position one means that there is undisputable knowledge, which cannot be taken as false or not workable, but yet leads unequivocally, without any additional assumptions, to the result, then no position of the mentioned ones is logical. If by existence of logic one means that there is a nice argument which stems from an assumption taken at random, then, for example, *berndf's and Nino's positions are both logical*, even if they are different. The two citations of mine reflect the same position said by different words.


And yet you called them _illogical_ in #96.....



learnerr said:


> Then, why in case of the transitive reflexive verbs the participle is left unchanged? You could say it does not behave in such case like an adjective, but this is again an abstract description of reason which is no better and no worse than the historical one about the participles with _avoir_. Also, why correct participles and not touch adjectives?


Which transitive reflexive verbs did you have in mind?


learnerr said:


> Also, maybe it is better, for example to get rid of the marker of the plural number in participles and adjectives? But this, by the way, again has its problem, namely liaison that sometimes occurs.


This is not the issue here.


learnerr said:


> My position: if you guys were arguing against any change, then I would argue for a change. But since you are arguing for changes, then I am arguing against any change.


You probably have noble intentions with this, but I fail to see them.


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## Nanon

Nino83 said:


> I don't suggest abolishing past participle agreements in pronominal verbs but (as proposed by AIROE) rendering facultative some agreements after the auxiliar verb _avoir_.


I would gladly suggest rendering some agreements facultative with pronominal verbs as well, difficult as that may be .



Nino83 said:


> Italian rule is simpler. Past participle agrees always with the subject unless there is a DO personal pronoun (only for third person personal pronouns) before the verb (that is the same rule for agreement with verb _avere_).
> In Spanish and Portuguese there's no agreement with pronominal verbs.


Thanks for filling me in about Italian, which is the part I actually don't know about. True, agreement rules are simpler in Portuguese and Spanish. That said, how legitimate is it to follow rules of a different, although closely related, language (rhetorical question )?



learnerr said:


> Also, one important difference between an Italian mind and a French mind is (must be) that for French difficult spelling of their language is something they are used to; one change of a disputable nature (good for you you have a strict enough criterion, that of ensuring closer correspondence between written and spoken language, but what is a criterion for some may be arbitrary for others) does not make deep difference for the ways how people have to approach to the language.


What we are, or were, taught at school is that there were two families of spelling rules: _orthographe grammaticale_ (all things governed by rules such as agreements and the like) and _orthographe d'usage_ (difficult spelling _per se_, spellings you have to memorise). This is like having to operate in parallel two systems that obey to diffeernt logics, but the result of both is the same at the end of the day: writing is not easy. Speaking is not easy either but people, including children, are less aware of those difficulties.



Nino83 said:


> in the first case the DO is the pronoun _se_ while in the second one the DO is _les cheveux_ *une fleur* (and there is not agreement because in the second case the DO is placed after the verb).





Nino83 said:


> France is one of the most developed countries in the world with very low rates of illiteracy (CIA World Factbook says that the rate is 1%, as in Italy, Germany, UK and so on) so it is really difficult to think that people make a such large amount of mistakes in spoken language.
> 
> Simply past participle agreement is no longer so important as it was in the past (after verb _avoir_).


France is not the only country involved . But grammatical differences between French-speaking countries are not significant.

_Spelling _in general is no longer as important as it was in the past, as it works less as a social marker than it used to.


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## Nino83

Nanon said:


> Thanks for filling me in about Italian, which is the part I actually don't know about. True, agreement rules are simpler in Portuguese and Spanish. That said, how legitimate is it to follow rules of a different, although closely related, language (rhetorical question )?



Jamais!  

I don't know if the fact that the Italians (including uneducated people) don't have any problem with past participle agreement depends on simpler rules or if it's a phonetic fact (it could be that, when you have a lot of regular verbs in _-er__, -ir, -re, -oir_, which don't have a different pronunciation in spoken language, it's harder to be accostumed to these rules). 
But the fact that French people abandoned the distinction between _vu_ [vy] and _vue_ [vy:], _allé_ [ale] and _allée_ [ale:] make me think. Was it a mere phonetic fact or did gender distinctions in past participle become less relevant in spoken language? 

It's clear that in Spanish and Portuguese it's not a phonetic matter (because final vowels and gender distinction in past participles are intact, it's a grammaticalization matter) while in French these two aspects seem to be more connected.


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## merquiades

Nino83 said:


> Jamais!
> 
> I don't know if the fact that the Italians (including uneducated people) don't have any problem with past participle agreement depends on simpler rules or if it's a phonetic fact (it could be that, when you have a lot of regular verbs in _-er__, -ir, -re, -oir_, which don't have a different pronunciation in spoken language, it's harder to be accostumed to these rules).
> But the fact that French people abandoned the distinction between _vu_ [vy] and _vue_ [vy:], _allé_ [ale] and _allée_ [ale:] make me think. Was it a mere phonetic fact or did gender distinctions in past participle become less relevant in spoken language?
> 
> It's clear that in Spanish and Portuguese it's not a phonetic matter (because final vowels and gender distinction in past participles are intact, it's a grammaticalization matter) while in French these two aspects seem to be more connected.



I think it is a matter of phonetics, what is not heard is forgotten.  Final -s, most other final consonants, final -e have dulled linguistic/ grammatical instinct in France.  When someone writes quickly without proofreading there are numerous errors even in educated speakers, eg. lack of _-s_ for the _TU_ form, or confusion between homonyms (_parler, parlez, parlé, parlée, parlés, parlés_), (_parlerai, parlerais, parlerait_).  When they stop to think about it educated people don't make these mistakes, but they are usually afterthoughts.  People often ask questions like "Should I stick an s or t on this word?" Mixing up _parlare, parlate, parlato, parlata, parlati, parlate_ would be unthinkable in Italian because the endings serve important grammatical purposes in the spoken language.  In French that is gone with the wind. When the pronunciation went mute so did the notion of what is correct grammar, now it is all learned, and that goes far beyond agreement of OD with _avoir_.


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> I think it is a matter of phonetics, what is not heard is forgotten.
> When the pronunciation went mute so did the notion of what is correct grammar, now it is all learned, and that goes far beyond agreement of OD with _avoir_.



I agree on what you said but this doesn't, totally, explain why the French keep saying _un garçon haut_ [œ̃ gaʁsõ o], _une fije haute_ [yn fijə o*t*] but _la lettre que j'ai écrit hier_ [la letʁə k ʒekʁi ieʁ] (very often) and _elle s'est assise_ [el se asi*z*]. 

It seems that there are two components, one phonetic and one of grammaticalization.


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> I agree with what you said but this doesn't, totally, explain why the French keep saying _un garçon haut_ [œ̃ gaʁsõ o], _une fije haute_ [yn fijə o*t*] but _la lettre que j'ai écrit hier_ [la letʁə k ʒekʁi ieʁ] (very often) and _elle s'est assise_ [el se asi*z*].
> 
> It seems that there are two components, one phonetic and one of grammaticalization.


There is no audible difference between male and female past participle in any of the four conjugation paradigms. This normally only occurs with real adjectives. It also occur with the past participles of a hand full of irregular verbs (the only one I can think of right now is _dire_) but that is probably not enough to keep the distinction alive orally.


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## learnerr

myšlenka said:


> And yet you called them _illogical_ in #96.....


As well as in the quote you are citing. The word 'logical' may be defined differently. No definition renders one decision logical and another not.


> Which transitive reflexive verbs did you have in mind?


Those where the reflexive pronoun is an indirect object, and the sentence has a direct object as well.


> This is not the issue here.


Right. Just to show that different issues may arise once one is starting talking about a change.


> You probably have noble intentions with this, but I fail to see them.


I am entirely ambivalent (as I already said) about what French will do, my intention was to say that whatever decision they take is a collective whim of the nation, not a necessary result not a necessary result of applying only undeniable knowledge.


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## Nanon

Such oppositions as _vu _[vy] / _vue _[vy:ə] and _allé _[ale] / _allée _[ale:ə] may occur in stage diction, so they have not disappeared totally. It will take more than 'a collective whim of the nation' (again, not only France is concerned even if it takes the lead) to change this.


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## learnerr

Corrected; I used the word 'whim' incorrectly; I meant a casual coincidence of circumstances rather than a conscious expression of will (about which I have already said it is not entirely decisive). Blame my English. 
Thank you for your information, it was interesting and something I did not know.


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## Nino83

berndf said:


> There is no audible difference between male and female past participle in any of the four conjugation paradigms. This normally only occurs with real adjectives. It also occur with the past participles of a hand full of irregular verbs (the only one I can think of right now is _dire_) but that is probably not enough to keep the distinction alive orally.



Yes, so they are no longer used to such rules only with verbs (it's the same thing that merquiades meant) but not with adjectives. I agree. 
It would be interesting to know how past participles are pronounced when they are used as adjectives (_dite, faite, mise, écrite_ etc..). 



Nanon said:


> Such oppositions as _vu _[vy] / _vue _[vy:ə] and _allé _[ale] / _allée _[ale:ə] may occur in stage diction, so they have not disappeared totally.



Ah, ok. I read that this distinction disappeared (in Paris) during the second part of XIX century. 
What is the situation in Quebec? They still have long and short vowels. Do they still pronounce _vu _[vy] / _vue _[vy:ə] and _allé _[ale] / _allée _[ale:ə]?


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## Nanon

Nino83 said:


> It would be interesting to know how past participles are pronounced when they are used as adjectives (_dite, faite, mise, écrite etc..).
> _


Easy . With final consonants. _La chose dite, la langue écrite_, etc. _*La langue écrit_ [ekʁi] would be regarded as agrammatical .



Nino83 said:


> Ah, ok. I read that this distinction disappeared (in Paris) during the second part of XIX century.
> What is the situation in Quebec? They still have long and short vowels. Do they still pronounce _vu _[vy] / _vue _[vy:ə] and _allé _[ale] / _allée _[ale:ə]?


It takes a Quebecer to answer . But this is heard in recited classical poetry and drama (or contemporary, but with classical features) and in some songs. Not in normal speech, though.
I am pretty sure Quebecers would answer in the same way I did, because those _dropped e's_ are important for prosody also for them (you may listen to some songs) but I never heard [vy:ə] and [ale:ə] in their speech.


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## Nino83

Thanks a lot for the answer


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