Le sujet dont on parle (notes sur les rôles accordés au pronom impersonnel

This paper addresses the various ways French speakers and grammarians perceive the impersonal pronoun and its use in a non pro-drop language such as French. Traditionally, French grammars assign considerable weight to the pronominal Subject, which causes problems in the analysis of clauses containing this Subject, as highlighted by comparison with the analysis of equivalent clauses, for instance, in Italian. On the basis of this consideration, it is also possible to profitably review the evolution of the demonstrative pronoun ce sont, where the lack of number concordance between two elements is generally observed. For this, the evolution of the demonstrative pronoun ce must be recalled: since in Old French this form was tonic, it was employed as a predicate and often placed as sentence head. After the advent of the modern syntactic order SVP, the sequence ce + V + S could survive only by reinterpreting the ancient predicate as Subject, and this is the way by which 17th-century grammarians could approve the sequence ce sont and Vaugelas's Remarks adduced it as an example of the argument for preferring use over reason. More recently, the expansion of ça as passe-partout Subject has been determined not as much by reference or grammatical requirements, but rather by the need for a new tonic pronoun to replace the old one for expressive or pragmatic purposes.