The present article addresses syntactic variation within French, and is an example of a relatively recent shift in attitude towards variation in this language. It considers the status of the variation with respect to the mental grammars of speakers, in particular in the light of Massot’s work suggesting that contemporary metropolitan France is characterised by diglossia, that is, a community of speakers with two (in this case massively overlapping but not entirely identical) ‘French’ grammars which co-exist in their minds, one stylistically marked High, the other Low. The article reviews one particular instance of variation and argues that Massot’s model needs to be revised in order to account for the particular phenomenon of surface forms which can be generated by both putative grammars but which have a different linguistic status in each
