Socio-historical linguistics and the history of French

Abstract

strt This paper outlines the development of socio-historical studies of French and examines some of the problems with attempting to apply sociolinguistic methods and models of the type derived from Labov's work to the study of a past e Âtat de langue. It is argued that, despite the many dif®culties both of data collection and of analysis and interpretation, the study of past variation is essential.

Historical sociolinguistics and authorship elucidation in medieval private written correspondence:

“…However, representativeness and statistical validity have often been questioned in Historical Sociolinguistics, making labov (1994: 11) assert that this discipline constitutes "the art of making the best use of bad data" (see also labov 1972; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2003/2017or Hernández-Campoy & Schilling 2012). The methodological difficulties are mostly due to the fact that the sociolinguistic study of historical language forms inevitably has to rely on the only available linguistic records from previous periods -most of which will be incomplete, fragmentary, or nonrepresentative in some way -as well as on socio-historical (and cultural) backgrounds that can only be reconstructed rather than directly observed or experienced by the researcher (see also Raumolin-Brunberg 1996;Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 1998, 2003Nevalainen 1999;Ayres-Bennett 2001;Schneider 2002;or Bauer 2002). In addition to these problems, the historical paradox and the so-called uniformitarian principle have also been part of the controversial issues in its methodological procedure (see Bergs 2012 and.…”

Diachronie de la négation phrastique en français : apports d'une approche sociohistorique

“…Pourtant, des différences de registre peuvent aussi exister à l'intérieur d'un seul et même texte. Par conséquent, tout comme Romaine (1982), Marchello-Nizia (2012) dissocie le récit (le narratif) et l'oral représenté (discours rapporté) – comme deux registres de langue dissemblables – au sein d'un même texte (voir aussi Fleischman 1990, Ayres-Bennett 2001). Sans nullement prétendre que l'oral représenté fournit un accès direct à la vraie langue parlée (Marchello-Nizia 2012 précise qu'il s'agit d'une représentation ), ce choix méthodologique reconnaît néanmoins l'hétérogénéité stylistique que peuvent manifester les textes, surtout ceux d'une certaine longueur, et fait parfois ressortir de la variation intratextuelle, avec des formes grammaticales dont le taux d'occurrence varie en fonction du registre et qui correspondent à des points distincts sur la trajectoire d'un changement diachronique.…”

Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French

“…Even without modern punctuation, certain utterances obviously represent speech. Typically introduced by a verbum dicendi (e.g., dire ‘say,’ faire ‘do, say’), such passages contain ‘textual dialogue’ (Fleischman, 1990: 65), ‘reported speech’ (Romaine, 1982: 158), or ‘quoted’ or ‘indirect’ speech (Ayres-Bennett, 2001: 161, 2004: 30). Price (1971: 147) distinguished between ‘conversational’ and ‘narrative’ passages, and Marchello-Nizia (2012) spoke of ‘l'oral représenté’ (represented oral [language]), with an insistence on represented .…”

“…In Cassidorus , the occasional short verse sections were excluded. These texts were chosen by Vance et al (2010) based on regional provenance, genre, and dating, without regard to an eventual historical sociolinguistic analysis (see Ayres-Bennett, 2001: 162). As a result, the corpus does not present a fully elaborated stylistic continuum akin to what Romaine (1982: 125) advocated.…”