Sur la langue des paysans de Marivaux: philologie et variation dans Le Père prudent et équitable et La Surprise de l’amour

Abstract

We aim to illustrate the first results of a research we are conducting on regionalisms in the literary production of seventeenth – and eighteenth-century authors, beginning with Cyrano de Bergerac’s Le Péd ant joué (1654) where peasant language made its appearance in “high” literature. Analyzing early editions, we will focus on Marivaux’s first two works in which the peasant character appears: Le Père prudent et équitable and La Surprise de l’amour. Our goal is to describe the variation of regionalisms from one work to another and from one edition to another to show how, over time, these forms appear and disappear for different reasons. This will provide us with insights into the question of language in the eighteenth century, the problem of written representation of oral code features, and the use of diatopic variation as an indicator of social variation.