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

This article presents an analysis of synchronic variation and diachronic change in verbal agreement with the French noun <i>foulei>. 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 exultei>_SING<i> de joie dans les ruesi> vs. <i>une foule de gens pressés s'attardenti>_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 foulei>). Some theoretical issues concerning the definition of collective nouns are also addressed.