La construction causative en faire et le marquage différentiel de l’objet en français

The aim of the paper is to show that differential object marking, i.e. special marking of a certain type of direct objects, which is not commonly recognized as a typological feature of French, occurs in French with clitics in the causative construction with the verb faire. Several examples of colloquial French thus show that the [+hum] direct object of faire (followed by an intransitive infinitive) occurs as a dative lui and not as an accusative le, as would be expected according to normative French.