'Anything you can do, tu can do better': tu and vous as substitutes for indefinite on in French

Research on Montreal French (Laberge and Sankoff 1979; Thibault 1991) has shown a spectacular rise in the use of indefinite tu (or vous ) in recent decades, at the expense of the standard form on . Although grammars of French have traditionally passed over indefinite tu / vous in silence, Ashby's study of Tours French (1992) confirmed that the phenomenon exists in metropolitan French also. The historical time-depth of indefinite tu/ vous has apparently not been explored previously, though Posner (1997) has suggested that indefinite tu is a modern feature, found especially in Canada. A survey of indefinite tu / vous in earlier periods and in a range of varieties forms the first part of this paper. Secondly, drawing on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy, northern France, the paper investigates the extent to which this use of the 2nd person pronouns: (i) helps to avoid ambiguity; (ii) co-occurs with another grammatical variable. Unlike the surveys of Montreal and Tours, the Picardy corpus includes a large majority of informants who used tu to address the interviewer, and this too is explored as a potential influence on speakers' use of 2nd person pronouns with indefinite reference.