Abstract
Charles Camproux (1908-1994) is a major figure of the first generation of the Occitan movement, contemporary of the writers Max Rouquette and René Nelli, he inaugurated by his personal journey the double posture of writer of oc – poet and novelist – and of linguist embodied by the two great personalities of the next generation: Robert Lafont and Pierre Bec. Endowed with a very vast knowledge of Occitan material, both scholarly and popular, he is the author of the first History of Occitan literature (Payot, 1953). As a linguist, he will work both in the field of philology and the study of medieval language – with a particular interest in the language of the troubadour Peire Cardenal – as well as in the contemporary spoken language, concentrating almost all of his work in synchrony on Gévaudan Occitan. Coming from the generation following that of G. Millardet and L. Alibert, he will offer, as a linguist, both the work of a dialectologist encouraged by the first and a work of a syntactician responding to the needs opened up by the grammar of the second. In fact, the notable shortcomings of the approach to syntax in the Gramatica occitana (Tèrça part – sintaxi, p. 262-353), are at the heart of the Camprousian project: to a normative aim, he prefered a descriptive aim, to a mainly literary corpus he will oppose a popular and oral corpus observed by his care, to a "Third Republic" approach and modeled on the Latin grammar applied to French, he will prefer to rethink the aspectual questions, the role of verbal uses and the subordination according to criteria intrinsic to the Gévaudan dialects, very often applicable elsewhere in Languedoc and in other Occitan dialects. Choosing to study the syntax of the Gévaudan dialects does not mean « limiting » the scope, far from it. To a Languedocian syntax starting from a presupposition or from a reconstruction based on material that is primarily literary – whose link to multiple, complex orality is never taken into account as such by Louis Alibert – where the notion linguistic rule would a priori be more convincing, Camproux opposes a syntax of the spoken language and embodied by a group of speakers with homogeneous practices, a syntax no less structured, but whose structures oppose both those of the normative alibertine syntax and to that of standard French whenever the quality of expressiveness requires it. It is the latter which is the organizing criterion superior to the structures mentioned.