French Studies: Early Medieval Literature

Bulletin du centre d'études médiévales d'Auxerre| …, 2005

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With 6193 preserved manuscripts and 1072 identified medieval authors, Old French was the most influential vernacular language of the European Middle Ages. We use the term "Old French" to denote the linguistic varieties commonly known as les langues d'oïl situated north of the Croissant transition zone (including the British Isles) which separates them from the Old Occitan dialects (les langues d'oc) of southern France.1 Old French was not only spoken and written in France and England, but also in Cyprus and the Holy Land, where French was the language of the ruling class for centuries. Even the Venetian Marco Polo used Old French to relate his travelogues,2 which formed part of the immensely influential fourteenth-century Franco-Italian literary movement. Other vernacular European literary traditions were heavily influenced by the French corpus. The most important writers of Middle High German classicism, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue, for example, translated and transformed the Old French romances Roman de Perceval ou Le conte du Graal (c. 1180), Erec et Enide (c. 1170) and Le roman d'Yvain ou du Chevalier au lion (c. 1177), all written by Chrétien de Troyes. England's most influential Arthurian text, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, is based on his translation of French sources. In this chapter we will gather significant passages of Old French literature, in order to classify them and to establish a tentative typology of narrated inscriptions, their multiple functions and possible interpretations.3

Among all the studies performed on medieval French syntax during the last decade, one construction in particular, variously known in the literature as “stylistic fronting” or “leftward stylistic displacement”, has provoked particularly lively debate. Atheoretically conceived, this construction is characterized by the presence of non-subject constituents to the left of the finite verb, such as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, infinitives, past participles, and prepositional phrases. One or more such elements may appear in both main and subordinate clauses, either to the left or to the right of the subject, when the subject is expressed. Originally at the heart of this debate was the apparent similarity between the medieval French construction and one found in contemporary and historical Scandinavian languages (Holmberg 2000; Hrafnbjargarson 2004). On the basis of a corpus containing instances of leftward stylistic displacement involving infinitives, past participles, and a small group of adverbs, Labelle and Hirschbühler (2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2017) have successfully illustrated that the medieval French construction is different from the Scandinavian one; there remains, however, much work to be done in terms of the holistic description of medieval French leftward stylistic displacement, particularly in view of the full variety of elements that can be displaced. The aim of the current project is twofold: firstly, to continue the descriptive project of Labelle and Hirschbühler (2017) by offering as complete a picture as possible of the totality of morphosyntactic variation that is inherent in this family of constructions, and secondly, to begin to understand what factors may (or may not) condition this variation. To that end, we construct a ~225,000-word plurigeneric corpus from portions of twelve texts ranging in date from the late-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and undertake a complete description of the leftward stylistic displacement that we find there. In addition to describing the construction itself as it appears through time, we consider three external textual and discursive variables: domain (a macro-version of text type), information structure, and reported discourse status. As a result of our study, we conclude that domain, on its own, is not a particularly good predictor of the morphosyntactic variation intrinsic to leftward stylistic displacement; we find that time, however, is an excellent predictor of this variation, an indication of a construction where change is very much at work. Using a series of decision trees for the information-structural tagging of our data, we also find that leftward stylistic displacement generally bears one of two information-structural values. On the basis of these, we propose a reanalysis of the structure of subordinate clauses in medieval French. With respect to discourse type, we find that discourse type (direct discourse versus narration) is not a good predictor of the morphosyntactic variation that characterizes leftward stylistic displacement. We conclude, finally, that leftward stylistic displacement represents a fertile ground for continued research in medieval French, especially as it pertains to subordinate clauses.

The aim of the present article is to discuss the scribal punctuation practice in one of Richard Rolle's epistles, Ego Dormio, found in two manuscripts that are genetically related: London, Westminster School MS 3 and Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève MS 3390. The analysis of samples seeks both to reveal regular patterns of use concerning punctuation symbols in each text and to test the extent to which there is a correlation between one scribe's use of punctuation marks when compared to the use employed by the other scribe. Although there is a quantitative exploration of the data, the method of analysis also considers contextual information in the description of each punctuation symbol to identify their functions. In addition, earlier works on medieval punctuation in the identification and categorization of symbols along with their already attested functions (following mainly Lucas 1971; Parkes 1992 and Zeeman 1956) have been employed. The results of the study will be compared with these functions in order to contextualize each scribal use of punctuation symbols within the tradition of Middle English manuscripts.

Speculum, 2001

2005

Diachronic Treebanks

This paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By contrast, estimates based on an abstract grammar competition model which distinguishes between grammar-ambiguous surface forms (overt personal subjects, null subjects in coordination contexts) and grammar-unambiguous surface forms (overt expletive subjects, null subjects in non-coordination contexts) show prose-verse parallelism, prose having an earlier change onset, in line with traditional intuitions. At a more general level, these results suggest that the product of the interaction of a particular grammar with universal pragmatic laws is constant...

French Studies Bulletin, 2022

In 1581, Claude Fauchet published the first history of the French language and its literature, the 'Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise'. In 1582, this text was translated into Italian by Filippo Pigafetta, under Fauchet's supervision. Long believed lost at sea in a shipwreck two years later, I recently located a substantial fragment of this manuscript.

@nalyses. Revue des littératures franco-canadiennes et québécoise, 1969

Les éditeurs des textes de la Renaissance présentés en éditions modernes doivent choisir entre les conventions typographiques des éditeurs d’origine ou une modernisation qui risque d’obscurcir certaines évidences précieuses pour favoriser une rencontre authentique avec le texte. Nous proposons ici le début d’une défense de l’édition modernisée.All Renaissance texts in modern editions must assume a format conforming to views concerning typefaces, spelling, and punctuation, whether of the initiating period or of the modern period. Representing the “other” is the watchword, and arguably this otherness is a component not only of Renaissance style and thought, but also of Renaissance printing conventions to the degree that they differ from our own. A rationale favouring the modernization of texts could however be in the very interests of authenticity.

Folia Linguistica Historica 19 (1-2), 1998