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'Anything you can do, tu can do better': tu and vous as substitutes for indefinite on in French
Author(s) -
Coveney Aidan
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of sociolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9841
pISSN - 1360-6441
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9481.00218
Subject(s) - linguistics , french , clitic , ambiguity , catalan , feature (linguistics) , history , philosophy
Research on Montreal French (Laberge and Sankoff 1979; Thibault 1991) has shown a spectacular rise in the use of indefinite tu (or vous ) in recent decades, at the expense of the standard form on . Although grammars of French have traditionally passed over indefinite tu / vous in silence, Ashby's study of Tours French (1992) confirmed that the phenomenon exists in metropolitan French also. The historical time‐depth of indefinite tu/vous has apparently not been explored previously, though Posner (1997) has suggested that indefinite tu is a modern feature, found especially in Canada. A survey of indefinite tu/vous in earlier periods and in a range of varieties forms the first part of this paper. Secondly, drawing on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy, northern France, the paper investigates the extent to which this use of the 2nd person pronouns: (i) helps to avoid ambiguity; (ii) co‐occurs with another grammatical variable. Unlike the surveys of Montreal and Tours, the Picardy corpus includes a large majority of informants who used tu to address the interviewer, and this too is explored as a potential influence on speakers’ use of 2nd person pronouns with indefinite reference.