Controversial Issues of Compliance with the Rules of Agreement in Complex French Tenses: Based on the Internet Forum Reddit.Com

The purpose of the article is to attempt to provide a reasoned and generalized coverage of a particular problem of French grammar concerning the simplification of the rule of agreement of the past participle participe passé (hereinafter PP) with the preceding object in complex French tenses. The problem of agreement of the past participle PP of verbs conjugated with the verb avoir with the preceding direct object has often been the subject of discussion by reform commissions in the French Ministry of Education since the end of the 19th century. A review of theoretical studies by Francophone scholars from the end of the 20th century to the present has shown that this issue remains relevant and controversial for French, Belgian, and Canadian scholars. The analysis of the controversial issue of past participle agreement in French compound tenses presented in the article is considered for the first time within the framework of the Internet discourse, which determines the novelty of the study. When solving one of the tasks - to identify the frequency and correctness of the use of this rule in text messages of the Internet forum Reddit.com - it was concluded that the rule of agreement of the past participle PP with a direct object preceding the verb is observed by a young French-speaking audience aged 18 to 35. For a linguistic analysis of the correctness of the use of the rule of agreement of the past participle PP in compound tenses of the French verb, text messages from the French-language section of the site “r/France”, to whose updates 1.7 million users are subscribed, were selected. The hypothesis that the younger generation of Reddit.com forum users show greater flexibility in the use of compound tenses of the French verb, and, as a result, allow deviations from the rules of agreement of the past participle PP, was not confirmed. It is concluded that the particular problem of French grammar on the agreement of the past participle PP in complex tenses does not lose its significance in the 21st century, when deviations from language norms are clearly manifested in such a form of interpersonal communication as Internet discourse.