Abstract
The aim of this paper is to find out some practical criteria for choosing “on” or “Pon”, which are semantically equivalent as French impersonal subject pronoun.As for this alternative, a grammarian of 17th century, Vaugelas, proposed some constraints depending on the neighboring sounds or spellings and based on the easiness to pronounce, write, hear and read, which have come down to almost all the subsequent grammarians.But in addition to these “euphonic rules”, it cannot be denied that there are some effects of an unknown heterogeneous parameter for this alternative, “historical or psychological identity of word”, explicable from the viewpoint of ideological linguistics ascribed to Damourette and Pichon.(1936).
We extracted from some electronic corpora overall instances of “on” and “l'on” with the preceding and following words, to simulate by the algorithm called C5.0 the hid-den rules governing the discrimination process.As a result, various causal factors (not only “euphonic rules”, but also “historical rules”) can be put together into a branching diagram to connect them with each other.Thus we have come to conclude that our complex probabilistic analysis is fully effective for the discrimination of “on” and “l'on”.
