Direct Speech in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles : A Linguistic Analysis

The fifteenth-century collection of short stories entitled Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is notorious for offering a reproduction singulièrement habile [...] de la langue alors parlée (Paris 1913). The present article proposes a linguistic analysis of spoken language as portrayed in MS Glasgow Hunter 252, the only extant manuscript copy of the collection. Consideration is firstly given to a number of noteworthy syntactic constructions, which cross-comparison with the electronic corpus Frantext Moyen Français (218 texts dated between 1330 and 1500) shows to be exceptionally attested. The use of these constructions may stem from the author’s noted efforts at conversational realism. The article then focuses on the dialectological evidence found at the phono-graphematic, morpho-graphematic and lexical levels, with particular attention to possible instances of linguistic stereotyping.