Competing genders: French partitive constructions between grammatical and semantic gender

In a study on the acceptance of semantic versus grammatical gender agreement in French, Sleeman & Ihsane (2016) argue that the acceptability of gender mismatches in partitive constructions is related to (i) the type of partitive construction and (ii) the type of animate noun involved. They base their argumentation on judgements of a limited number of (Swiss) French informants on a limited number of test sentences. The aim of the present study is to further explore gender agreement in partitive constructions in a more systematic way and with a larger sample of speakers, by means of a controlled grammaticality judgement task, administered to 62 native speakers of French. Our results are generally compatible with those of Sleeman & Ihsane and can be accounted for using their theoretical analysis. In addition this paper provides more insight into the linguistic factors that influence the acceptability of semantic agreement in French partitive constructions.