Ellipsis of Personal Pronouns and Unmarked Verb Forms in Acadian French / De L’Ellipse Du Pronom Personnel Aux Formes Verbales Non Marquées Dans Les Parlers Acadiens

The little francophone community of Port-au-Port Peninsula in Newfoundland is particularly representative of non-standard French spoken in North America (Brasseur 1997). This paper tries to elaborate a grammatical analysis in order to justify the transcriptions of verb forms in the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de Terre-Neuve (2001). In the sentence “I passait les maisons, [bladʒe] ac le monde”, for instance, [bladʒe] could be interpreted as “blaguait” or “blaguer.” In standard French, the same sentence could be translated as “il allait de porte en porte parler avec les gens” or “il allait de porte en porte, parlait avec les gens.” The omission of the subject pronoun seems to allow the transition toward a unmarked verb form either under a short form, limited to the radical of the verb, without any flexional mark like an imperative form, or a full form, like what Remacle (1952) calls “infinitif substitut.” The last stade of this evolution is the nominal phrase, whose use is widely spread in popular (e.g. Acadian) French, where it often follows a verb phrase.