Approches du moyen français. 2

Approches du moyen franqais II, consisting of eleven articles, is a follow-up to Approches du moyen franqais, edited by Ulla Jokinen and Päivi Sihvonen-Hautecoeur, which appeared four years ago. Today, as in 1988, the subject under discussion is, in the broadest sense, the language and literature of the Middle French period. Three articles are primarily concerned with lexicography. One of them (J.-P. Chambon) explains three Burgundian expressions in Andrieu de la Vigne, while another examines the position of a number of locutions in French lexis (G. Roques). The third is a review (L. Löfstedt) of Giuseppe Di Stefano's Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen franqais (Montreal, 1991). Six articles are concerned with both lexicography and syntax. The syntagmatic forms in which même and propre are used in the meanings of IDEM, IPSE, ETIAM are compared (U. Jokinen), and the use of demonstratives is studied in Martial d' Auvergne's Les Arrêts d' Amour (A. Sakari). Word order is the focus of attention in a contribution dealing with the order of the elements S-V in independent declarative clauses in Philippe de Commynes (K. Piiparinen & S. Suvanto), while in another article the author attempts to define the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which forms of dislocation occur in Guillame Fillastre's Traittie de Conseil (H. Häyrynen). Further articles describe features which stem from a discourse component, the opposition que/ce que in certain argumentative texts (B. Combettes), and consider the use in discourse of the morphemes or and done, particularly before an imperative (E. Sakari). A more strictly approach is to be found in the two remaining articles. The sources of Bouchet's Les Regnars traversant are examined to determine the extent to which the author is innovative or imitative (E. Suomela-Härmä), and finally the author of the eleventh article, the latest editor of the texts of Villon, starting with a tabula rasa, elucidates the weight of editorial tradition in our interpretation of the text (C. Thiry).