Is the French passive a construction, as Construction Grammars understand it?

The passive has often been presented as a typical example of construction, in the sense of the word put forward in the Construction Grammar theories, especially in the works of A. Goldberg. In this view, the meaning of the passive is considered as non-compositional. First, we will re-examine the concept of construction, especially from the perspective of the compositionality of meaning. We then propose a compositional semantic analysis of the passive in French sometimes called periphrastic passive. We show that the meaning of this construction derives from the meanings of the verb etre and the past participle. This analysis thus relativizes the importance of the non-compositionality of meaning (total or partial) as a defining property of the concept of construction, at least for French periphrastic passive construction.