La polysémie de la parole : décodage de la lyrique multilingue en langues romanes chez Raimbaut de Vaqueiras et Dante Alighieri

Abstract

Medieval France produced various texts in verse that engaged several Romance langues sometimes in alternation with Latin. This phenomenon is called multilingual, plurilingual or macaronic poetry. This study is a close examination of the multilingual romance lyric of the troubadours and other secular writers with respect to structural, thematic and ideological aspects. It focuses on the way in which the different languages influenced and interacted with one another. Accordingly, our analysis, which will be comparative and synchronic, is based on a closed corpus of two texts. We examine first the multilingual canso Eras quan vey verdeyar by the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (c. 1155-1207). A structural analysis shows the relationship of the interaction of languages, their sonority, rhyme and different lexical fields. On a linguistic level, the poem bears witness to the compatibility, due to their semantic and phonetic similarities, of five Romance languages (Occitan, Italian, French, Gascon and GalicianPortuguese). Next, we examine the trilingual serventois, Ai faux ris, attributed to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). This composition testifies to the harmonious coexistence of Italian, French and Latin within a single poem in a linguistic alternation of lines of verse. On a thematic level, a religious message seems to be attached to the representation of the world of the fin‟amor. This message constitutes the central axis around which the lexical fields and the negative image of the homeland unfold. The last chapter is dedicated to a comparison of the two texts: the linguistic architecture of stanzas, preferred by Raimbaut, contrasts markedly with Dante‘s arrangement of lines —a phenomenon which occasionally prevents analysis along the same criteria. Nonetheless, a syntactic fusion of the languages is possible in both cases.