On the two French subjectless verbs voici and voilá

Abstract

The much-debated syntactic status of voici ‘ here is’ and voilà ‘(t)here is’ in French relates principally to the theoretical status of syntactic categories and of grammatical subject. The first issue can be properly addressed only if one accepts a minimal theory of constituent structure. The surface distribution of voici/voilà then shows that they are two subjectless finite verbs with a single tense and mood: present indicative. Not surprisingly, they have lost some of these exceptional characteristics in certain dialects of French: they have acquired a personal conjugation in Québec French, and new tenses in Walloon and Franco-Provençal. These facts are relevant to syntactic theories which require all basic sentences to have grammatical subjects at some level of analysis, since no independent parameter is available to account for the systematic absence of surface subjects before a small set of verbs in a non-‘PRO-drop’ language like French.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.