VERS LA DISPARITION DE LA FLEXION VERBALE EN FRANÇAIS ET SON REMPLACEMENT PAR DES PRONOMS PERSONNELS ANTICIPÉS : LE CAS DU PRONOM « ON »/« L’ON » ET SES VICISSITUDES EN FRANÇAIS CONTEMPORAIN
CONCERNING THE DISAPPEARANCE OF VERBAL INFLECTION IN FRENCH AND ITS REPLACEMENT BY ANTICIPATED PERSONAL PRONOUNS: THE CASE OF THE PRONOUN ‘ON’/ ‘L'ON’ AND ITS VICISSITUDES IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH

Summary/Abstract: The present study deals with the question of why, among all the Romance languages, the French language is the only one to have created, successively, a third-person pronoun of the singular in the forms of ‘l’on’/ ‘on’, then a first-person pronoun of the plural ‘on‘. The origin of these pronouns is studied in the first part of the study, while the second part considers the influence that the final ‘-on (s)’ of the first persons of the plural could have had on the extension of the pronoun ‘on’, to the point that it tends to replace today, in the spoken language, the pronoun ‘nous’ in its subject function. The study constantly highlights the remarkable consistency of these developments.

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