جزییات کتاب
Medieval French punctuation still remains an underexplored field in historical linguistics, although some research has been carried out since 1970ies. Medieval punctuation is almost completely ignored by scholarly editions. However it does contain some useful linguistic data, as it allows to see what was the “natural” text structure for medieval scribes and gives the reader some guidelines for interpretation of a written message. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of major trends in the evolution of the practice of punctuation in medieval French manuscripts and incunabula in two ways. On the one hand a methodology of representation of primary sources and their linguistic analysis is elaborated. On the other hand, new data are introduced and analysed. The linguistic analysis in this thesis is based on the functional approach of the language. Its spoken and written forms are considered to be systems of marks having a number of functions. Not only conventional punctuation marks are studied, but also all the other linguistic marks that can “work together” with punctuation in organising text structures at different levels. The research has been based on corpus of “multi-level” transcriptions of 29 manuscript and incunabula fragments (28 000 words) fully marked up for “punctuable units”. The XML transcriptions are TEI conformant and are integrated into the BFM Old French corpus .