Variantes d’éditeurs et évolution syntaxique au XVIe siècle

Abstract This article sheds light on the linguistic modifications found in nine successive sixteenth-century editions from Paris and Lyon of the anonymous prose version of La Belle Hélène de Constantinople. Particular focus will be placed on aspects of syntactic revision, such as subject-verb inversion in declaratives, placement of object pronouns, introduction of embedded clauses and separation of relative clauses from their antecedents. After a presentation of the textual tradition, linguistic variants will be examined in light of previous studies on Middle and Preclassical French, and then compared with data found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammars. It is in prints from the second half of the sixteenth century that one tends to find linguistic variants that became predominant and spread. This confirms the hypothesis of a global linguistic change in the middle of the sixteenth century, which allowed the frontier between Middle French and Preclassical French to shift at that time. Corpora comprising various successive editions of the same text thus make it possible to observe and date phenomena of linguistic evolution and offer a window into the editorial habits concerning the language. They make it easier to see how the process of language standardisation was linked to the development of printing.