The Interplay of Internal and External Factors in Grammatical Change: First-person Plural Pronouns in French

In contemporary spoken European French, on meaning 'we' is the predominant first-person plural variant, having largely supplanted its competitor, nous. There is, however, considerable debate as to whether the domination of on is the result of fairly rapid change in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries or whether there is actually a robust tradition of on usage going back several centuries. In this article, we trace the trajectory of first-person plural pronominal variation over four centuries of usage and investigate the role of both linguistic and extralinguistic conditioning factors, an analysis based on data from plays and parodic dialogues, metalinguistic commentary (by grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists), and naturalistic data (sociolinguistic interviews). The study not only involves quantitative and qualitative analysis of on and nous usage, the variants typically considered in the literature, but also focuses on the use of je in combination with the first-person plural ending -ons, a lower-class variant not sufficiently taken into account in earlier studies. We show that a shift toward dominant on does take place in the latter half of the nineteenth century in lower-class speech, but on is not adopted by the upper classes until the twentieth century. Further, the lower class does not move directly from je to on but rather passes through an intermediate stage wherein nous is the dominant variant, a transition interpreted as part of a general shift toward greater analycity in the pronominal system. We show that for much of the period under study, on is primarily associated with unrestricted reference, taking over in restricted reference contexts only as the change accelerates. We then compare variation and change in European French to what has obtained in both conservative and innovative New World varieties, varieties with closely related grammars but that differ with regard to their history and to the sociolinguistic settings in which they are spoken. This comparison allows further testing and confirmation of the analyses put forward for European French.