Linguistic interest of LDR

As was shown, LDR are highly codified in structure and, consequently, also reveal special linguistic codes. On the one hand, they are generally assumed to be characterised by a style recommended by the handbooks of the chancellery (Davis 1988). However, Davis (1988)

26 We opted for another LDR because it allows to exemplify in more detail the extra sigillum notes.

27 The typical formula subscripsi, abbreviated to subs., ss. and SS. are missing. See http://www.cei.lmu.de/VID/VID.php?254, 4^th February 2015, 10:35.

28 For more on this subject see Gauvard (2010).

focuses on LDR from the 16th century, it is therefore debatable to which extent her conclusions can be adopted for the present LDR. The protocol, the clause of corroboration and the eschatocol are essentially the typical formula used by the chancellery. The dispositio and the injonctio display a somewhat less fixed style, but still contain many typical collocations of the legal genre. This underlines Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1994) assumption that almost all genres of medieval letters are marked by the Distanzsprache (language of distance).

On the other hand, LDR are recognized as being extremely vivid with regard to the subjects, the details, and Cacheux (1908) considers the writers to not take notion of any literary concerns.

This essentially refers to the narratio and possible additional conditions on the validity of the document where legal formula are generally lacking and is easily explained by the fact that the former is essentially based on the request for pardon of the suppliant. As said above, the narratio narrates the events. For that, direct speech is used as well as first and second person forms as illustrated in (11).

(11) Lequel Vignon n'en voulut riens fere, mais tensoit plus fort que devant, en lui disant : «Vaurabourg, vous m’avez mis en avant d'un arbre que j’ay fait abatre en la forest, mais vous n’avez gaires gangnié et n'en sera gaires plus riche, se j’en fais amende; et se vous servez bien, vous faites bien ; mais je me doubte que tantost le temps changera; par quoy vous, messieurs les officiers du Roy d'Angleterre, n'aurez pas si grant audience.» Sur quoy ledit Vaurabourg respondit a icellui Vignon que il servoit si bien le Roy en son office que lui ne autre n'en pourroient dire que tout bien, et que se il vouloit mal dire de nous, qu'il ne le deist point devant lui.

This Vignon did not want to do anything but continued to discuss even more than before by saying to him: “Vaurabourg, you have referred to a tree that I have had felled in the forest but you have not won hardly anything and you are hardly going to be richer if I pay the penalty; and if you serve well, you do well, but I am doubting that soon the time will change; by what you, gentlemen, officers of the King of England will not have such a big audience.” Whereupon the said Vaurabourg answered to this Vignon that he served the king so well in his office that neither he nor anyone could say anything but all good and that if he wanted to say bad things about us, that he should not say them in front of him. (1425,79)

In addition, parts of regionalisms and swear words can be found in LDR as illustrated in (12), taken from Lebsanft (2005: 365):

(12) […] Et depuis dirent lun alautre par maniere desbatement pluseurs paroles et tant que ledit de Chastillon [12] cognut au parler que ycellui thomas estoit picart / et pour ce par esbatement se prist aparler le langage [13] de picardie / et ledit thomas qui estoit picart prist a contrefaire le langage de france / et parlerent ainsi [14] ensemble longuement / et tant que ledit thomas se prist a courcier de ce que ledit de chastillon contrefaisoit [15] son langage / et lappella pour lui faire desplaisir Sires homs en lui disant que cestoit adire ou langage [16] de leur pays co[u]x […]

And then they discussed for fun and the said Chastillon noticed that this Thomas was Picard because of his way of speaking. Because of that, for the fun of it, he started to speak the language of Picardy and the said Thomas who was Picard started to imitate the language of (the Ile-de-)France and so spoke for a long time and then the said Thomas got angry about the fact that the said Chastillon imitated his language and called him in order to annoy him “Sires homs” and told him that this meant cuckold in the language of his region.

Apart from consciousness of the existence of different regional variants as the langage de Picardie and the langage de France, the apparently Picard swear word Sires homs is translated here with the French coux ‘cuckold’. According to Koch and Oesterreicher (1985), the use of swear words and direct discourse are marks of the Nähesprache (language of immediacy).

However, they also postulate that the use of the language in various discourse traditions qualifies a given language to be used as a variant of Distanzsprache.

How can LDR be classified under these assumptions? Koch and Oesterreicher (1985: 30) introduce the term elaborierte Mündlichkeit (elaborated orality) in order to account for the

“distanzsprachliche Ausprägung von Mündlichkeit”, i.e. orality in a context of Distanzsprache.

This corresponds to what Marchello-Nizia (2014) understands by the term oral representé (represented oral), namely direct speech used within texts, which she takes to be the unique possibility to approximate the orality in diachronic data.

To sum up, for my corpus, I take these observations into account by primarily considering the narratio, since this is the part of the LDR where elaborierte Mündlichkeit takes place among

parts of more distant narration. Furthermore, pure narration is distinguished from direct and indirect discourse in the annotation. With regard to the fixed passages of the LDR, embedded contexts exhibiting variation in word order are taken into consideration although when it comes to the analytic parts, their origin will be taken into account. Next, the precise methodology that has been used for the annotation procedure is presented.