Fr: When Do You Make Past Participles Agree?
On a language forum that I browse, someone has just started a thread about agreement with past participles in French. I’ve posted a reply later in the thread, because one person is getting confused about an elementary part of the equation. What I thought I would do is speak about the past tense here, before giving the answer that I gave to her in another post.
Here are the basics:
The great majority of French verbs use the auxiliary avoir followed by the past participle to construct the passé composé. We do the same thing in English: “No thanks, I don’t want to see the new James Bond movie. I’ve already seen it twice.”
For a few French verbs (usually indicating movement) the verb être is used in place of avoir. Although not so common in English, it used to be the regular thing in English too. Consider the phrase He is come. This used to be the standard form in English as recently as the seventeenth century. The King James Bible has numerous examples, of which one is The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things, from John 4:25.
Those verbs which are conjugated with être always have their participles agreeing with the gender and number of the subject: Je suis allé could only be a male saying I went. Write it as Je suis allée, and you know that the subject is female. Your plural forms show themselves as Ils sont allés for males or a mixed group, and Elles sont allées for a group comprising uniquely women.
However: Verbs which are conjugated with avoir always take the standard past participle form (the masculine) unless they are proceeded by a pronoun which represents the direct object.
Examples are probably more useful than words:
J’ai mis mes clés sur la table. (I put my keys on the table.)
Here mettre is put in the past form mis. It doesn’t matter whether the person speaking is a man or a woman; verbs in avoir always take the standard (masculine) form. J’ai démandé, j’ai chanté, j’ai rendu …
You change the ending of these avoir verbs only when a pronoun which represents the direct object comes before the past form:
J’ai perdu mes clés! C’est où que je les ai mises?! (I’ve lost my keys! Where have I put them?!)
When the object clés comes after the verb, there’s no change in the past form perdu. Once the pronoun les is introduced before the verb (replacing the word clés), you have to make the past form agree, so mis becomes mises because clés is feminine plural.
Of course, it wouldn’t be French without further complications. At school we always learn that reflexive or pronominal verbs take être and that, of course, the past participle thus has to agree.
Well, yes and no.
If we take the verb se souvenir (to remember: now you know why we call keepsakes at the seaside souvenirs) and put it in the past, it’s true that there is agreement: A woman would say Je me suis souvenue whereas a man would say Je me suis souvenu. In this respect, the rule holds.
We, or at least I, were taught incorrectly at school that this rule applies all the time with être verbs. It doesn’t. The one I remember was saying that someone had broken their arm. We were taught that the masculine form is Il s’est cassé le bras and the feminine Elle s’est cassée le bras. This seems fair enough, but it is wrong.
In both cases the past participle should be cassé, the masculine form. The reason is that in normal pronominal or reflexive verbs, we consider the particle se to be the direct object. However, once you include a direct object (le bras) in the sentence you can no longer consider the se to be one; it now becomes an indirect object (à soi), and so doesn’t agree.
So it would appear that the presence of direct objects determine whether we make agreements or not.
For avoir verbs, the norm is not to agree unless there is a direct object present as a pronoun (so, in front of the verbs). For être verbs things are the opposite: The norm is to make agreements unless there is a direct object following on the heels of the participle, in which case agreement is dropped.
It all seems unnecessarily convoluted, really 
Tags: Past Participles