Le diminutif dans la littérature en moyen français

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe the evolution and function of the diminutive system used by the principal Middle French poets and prosaists (1337-1598). In Middle French the formation of synthetic diminutives seems to have been productive, which is not the case any longer. The study focuses on the sixteenth century because this period is generally considered rich as regards the formation of diminutives. The material consists of two corpora: corpus I, the Jyväskylä corpus of Middle French prior to 1530, and corpus II, a new corpus of sixteenth-century French compiled by the present author. Synthetic diminutives are included in the study if they are formed by means of suffixes expressing small size or hypocoristic ideas. These diminutives have a semantic relation to the base word. The statistics include only those diminutives which were productive in Middle French. As regards analytic diminutives, only those formed with the epithet petit are included, as these allow the epithet to be changed into the diminutive suffix without significant change in the semantics of the word in question. The use of the diminutives is analysed from a morphopragmatic point of view. The literary genre does not seem to have an effect on the use of diminutives in the corpora. Rabelais's verbal creations and imaginative style seem to favour the formation of diminutives found in corpus II. All the poets of the Pleiade group use a modest quantity of diminutives. Louise Labe and Marguerite de Navarre, poetesses included in corpus II, do not show any predilection for diminutives. In both corpora, diminutive formation is rather scarce, with slightly more cases in corpus II than in corpus I. Hence it was not the classicism of the seventeenth century that eliminated the use of diminutives, as has been argued, since they were rare already in the sixteenth century. In Middle French, analytic diminutives prevailed over synthetic diminutives. Synthetic diminutive formation thus differentiated French from other Romance languages as early as during the Middle French period.