L’évolution des termes d’adresse à contenu social en ancien et en moyen français

Abstract

Based on a corpus of texts in Old and Middle French, this research examines the behavior of vocative nominal groups in direct speech. After presenting an analysis of the currently available descriptions of vocative and appellative, we present the concept of terms of address (detached nominal groups used vocatively in direct speech to address the co-locutor, i.e. the addressee) in contrast with designatives (bound nominal groups used in narrative to refer to the locutor, the addressee or the third person –“délocuté”). We adopt a sociolinguistic approach suggesting that terms of address are markers of social status, and we study the vocative nominal groups in comparison with social reality. The grammatical nature of terms of address is defined and compared with the nature of bound nominal groups used in narrative to refer to the same addressee. The position of terms of address within the utterances found in the corpus are then analysed in the last part of this research, where the general proposition that terms of address are mainly speech markers is questioned.

Keywords

• direct speech
• nominal group
• social status
• location of direct speech
• verse
• prose