Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2025

Number Syllepsis: Linguistic Functioning and Didactic Processing

La syllepse de nombre : fonctionnement linguistique et traitement didactique

Tatiana Taous

Résumé

The hesitations of today’s speakers about the degree of grammaticality of French sentences or phrases, where the grammatical number seems to be atypical, can be connected with the morphosyntactic concerns of the first grammarians, proof that the question has not yet found a consensual solution or that the provided explanations have not been able to spread. The Greeks and Latins described these phenomena first by focusing on the morphosyntactic deviations (with diverse interpretations – from mistake-solecism to figure-syllepsis –), then by giving to these deviations a semantic or even conceptual dimension (particularly restated by the first Christian exegetes). In fact, the grammatical or school examples associated to sylleptic phenomena were very different: they did not illustrate the same linguistic facts (verb phrase ellipsis vs disagreement between subject number and verb number vs contrast between the linguistic formulation and the extralinguistic referent). Integrated to French grammar, number syllepsis has had varying fortunes (for example, Beauzée thought that the syllepsis could be ignored, when it consisted in a verb ellipsis, while nineteenth-century school grammar saw it as a pedagogically promising notion, conducive to justifying – if not explaining – many surprising facts of chains of agreement). Nevertheless, the grammarians who recognised this notion became autonomous vis-à-vis the description based on Latin facts, and thus demonstrated a renewal of thinking: new data (morphosyntactic, axiological and variationist) came to light. In this chapter, we would like to highlight these theoretical contributions, but also to link them to the didactic issues. We have confined our study to cases of disagreement between the subject and the conjugated verb and have focused on four relevant points: 1) on the production side (linguistic level), the importance of the syntagmatic chain and the extralinguistic level (prominence of the numerical referent) in the selection of agreement; 2) on the reception side (metalinguistic level), the tolerance and acceptability, made possible in conditions of homophony-heterography ; 3) in terms of theoretical renewal, “genitive agreement” as an indication of the autonomy of French grammar vis-à-vis Latin grammar; 4) in terms of didactic renewal, the possibility of a consciously non-univocal analysis, which thus restores the study of language at school to a dynamic dimension.

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Dates et versions

hal-05334650 , version 1 (12-03-2026)

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Tatiana Taous. La syllepse de nombre : fonctionnement linguistique et traitement didactique. Franck Neveu & Delphine Pasques (éds). La catégorie du nombre, De Gruyter, pp.393-416, 2025, ⟨10.1515/9783111505084-021⟩. ⟨hal-05334650⟩
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