ABSTRACT
The twelfth century witnessed the flowering of literature in the vernacular in France and the experimentation with new genres; here we have examples of an epic (text 5) and a verse romance (text 6). While these are both great works of their kind, they are also typical of literary usage of the period in being in verse and displaying that mixture of heterogeneity and homogeneity of linguistic usage discussed in the introduction, that is, the co-existence of dialectal and supra-regional features. In many cases, too, there is a difference of time and place between the date of composition and the date of the base manuscript: many manuscripts survive in an Anglo-Norman hand as in the case of Roland; many date from the thirteenth or even the fourteenth century, so that we are faced with ‘une diachronie interne’ (Andrieux and Baumgartner 1983: 9). Furthermore, comparison of these literary texts with those of other discourse types suggests that they were probably written in a rather conservative language, in terms both of their morphology and their syntax. An example of a thirteenth-century fabliau has been included as an example of a more popular literary form (text 7).
