Peu ou prou Lexical statistics and phraseology over the centuries

The morpheme prou , attested since ca. u00, survives in Modern French only in the adverbial phrase peu ou prou , 'more or less' (lit. 'little or much') and marginally in its antonymic version ni peu ni prou . In medieval French, prou was used in a variety of ways: as a noun, an adjective (Mod. Fr. preux ), an adverbial, and an indefinite pronoun. The purpose of this study is to elucidate, with the help of a selection of corpora extracted from the FRANTEXT database, each of which covering one century starting with the 12th, the dating of the gradual reduction of the transcategoriality of prou to the status of a simple constituent of a fixed adverbial locution.