摘要：The book is an extensive, linguistic and literary/stylistic study on the methods of marking off reported speech in literature during the premodern period of English (1350–1600), on the basis of several different categories of manuscripts and printed texts now included in Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMEPV). The issue should be addressed by the diachronic research of a language, since the soundness of a medieval text’s modern edition, the hermeneutics of the text and the conclusions regarding the aspects that a language might have had in the past lean upon a correct separation of the discourses and of the “voices” that create them. In this respect, for example, Suzanne Romaine believes that understanding the fact that “the norms for reporting speech in discourse or verse may have been different then [i.e. 1530–1550, Middle Scots] or could have varied according to genre” (Romaine, 1982, p. 125) is crucial in order to maintain a pertinent hypothesis about the aspect of a colloquial variant of an old language, for “[e]ven if we examine quoted or indirect speech in prose or verse texts [...], which may be assumed to approximate speech to some extent, this is not speech” (ibidem).
