Semantic gender agreement: French versus Germanic languages

It is quite commonly known that personal pronouns referring to animate nouns may show semantic instead of grammatical gender agreement. While extensively studied for Germanic languages (e.g., Dutch, German), pronominal agreement did not receive much attention for French. Yet, French grammars indicate that semantic agreement on pronouns is an option, and studies on partitive constructions show that speakers of French may accept semantic agreement in these constructions. Therefore, the goal of the present study is to explore whether speakers of French use semantic agreement on personal pronouns and, in a next step, compare this to what previous studies showed about pronominal agreement in the Germanic languages, and Dutch and German in particular. The results of a sentence completion task with 32 native speakers show that semantic agreement is indeed the preferred option, although semantic agreement seems to be mediated by topicality and individuation.