Aux frontières de la norme : usages linguistiques de scripteurs peu lettrés dans des correspondances de la Grande Guerre

The present study aims to investigate a set of non-standard linguistic usages, observed in a corpus of letters written by less-literate writers during the Great War. Its objective is to identify trends and general principles that can shed light on their functioning. The corpus under study consists of texts of private correspondence between the soldiers and their relatives during the Great War, collected as part of the Corpus 14 Project (Steuckardt, dir.). The processing of these archival documents (diplomatic transcription, digital edition in TEI-XML, semantic annotation of named entities) has allowed their publication in open access, ensuring their sustainability, as well as the tool-based exploitation of the data. The linguistic analyses carried out on this corpus take into consideration two dimensions typical of the non-standard usages of less literate writers. Regarding the phenomena related to the use of the written medium, the study has focused on the process of under-segmentation, with an emphasis on the binding of pronominal forms to other morphemes; as for the usages which are specific to a variety of immediate communication, the several uses of the morpheme que (as a pronoun, a conjunction or an adverb) have been investigated. The first case study showed that under-segmentation materializes in forms either fabricated by the writers or attested but not expected in those specific contexts. This process is influenced by two main tendencies linked to the syntactic functions of the pronouns involved in the under-segmentations and to the existence of homophonous-heterographic words. The second case study revealed that the so-called working-class or colloquial uses of the morpheme que are actually quite infrequent. It suggested several explanations to account for them: their existence in older states of the language, the more advanced lexicalization of que with a restrictive meaning, the analogy with similar standard constructions, the expansion on the discursive plane of a syntactic dependency, and the use in writing of common spoken constructions. This study shows that the non-standard linguistic forms observed in the corpus are not random but rely on regular patterns. It emphasizes the need to take into account the usages at the edges of the norm for a comprehensive description of linguistic production.