Abstract
This article deals with discourse markers in various types of literature originating from the 14th and 15th century. It is based on a historical-pragmatic perspective, focusing on speech-like texts and seeking to determine their degrees of orality. The corpus-based study compares the use of discourse markers in medieval trials, mystery play texts, chansons de geste and their prose versions. The study demonstrates great variation of discourse markers across texts regarding frequency of occurrence, values and usage according to the literary genre. Dialogic genres show more variety of discourse markers than epic stories and prose fiction. Moreover, some discourse markers that can only be found in drama comedies are still used as discourse markers in modern French. Their presence is closely related to the interactional context. Finally, orality is differently represented in different genres of medieval texts. Each of these representations pertains to a specific literary genre and various degrees of orality can be identified.
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