L'accord sujet-verbe en français contemporain: une étude de cas – <i>la/une foule</i>

This article presents an analysis of synchronic variation and diachronic change in verbal agreement with the French noun <i>foule</i>. This noun, like many collective nouns in French and other languages, can show variation between singular and plural verbal agreement (<i>la foule des habitants exulte</i>_SING<i> de joie dans les rues</i> vs. <i>une foule de gens pressés s'attardent</i>_PLU). A novel combination of data, including data from sociolinguistic interviews, a gap-fill exercise, and a corpus of written French, is used to investigate this variation and change, to elucidate some of the factors that play a role in this type of agreement, and to examine the differences between this form used with the definite and indefinite determiner (<i>la foule </i>vs. <i>une foule</i>). Some theoretical issues concerning the definition of collective nouns are also addressed.