Matériels sur tout + gérondif

The goal of this article is to provide new empirical data on “ tout  + gerund” in present day French by means of quantitative (two corpora of spoken French, one corpus taken from the French press) and qualitative analyses (two metalinguistic tests based on paraphrase and acceptability). From a statistical point of view, it seems that tout  + gerund is not very frequent, it is often placed after the principal verb and it expresses atelic events. From a qualitative point of view, the syntactic and semantic possibilities of tout  + gerund seem to be wider than those suggested by previous introspective analyses, and speakers seem to follow a certain logic on choosing such values. Beyond opposition and synchrony, our data show that tout  + gerund can express temporal location, inclusion and cause. Moreover, it tolerates an implicit subject that may be diff erent from the subject of the main verb. Finally, since it is probably a “phrasal converb” (as it correlates two more or less independen