De la topicalisation impersonnelle en français moderne

Abstract

About Impersonal topicalization in modern French

In most languages of the world, especially in Western languages such as Latin, French, English, German, etc., a category of verbs is only used in the third person singular to express certain facts. Another category, combining all persons at the start, by transformation, is only used in the third person singular. So they use the pronoun "he"only to conjugate. So we have, in the same statement, a grammatical subject and a logical subject. Can a single verb have two subjects at the same time? What are these verbs using a universe pronoun in French to conjugate? How are they built? What is the semantics of these verbs? To address this issue, we will rely on morphosyntax and on a corpus composed of seven works. Our contribution aims to decipher sentences containing verbs that are conjugated only in the third person singular both syntactically and semantically and whose apparent subject is "he"and the logical subject postposed to the verb. The text is based on Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, Molière's School for Women, La Fontaine's Fables, Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas, Corneille's Cinna, Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis clos et des Flies, and finally, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire. The theoretical framework used is morphosyntax.