Taylor, Davis. "The Terms of Love: A Study of Troilus's Style"

Speculum, 51(1) 69-90. 1976.

The author conducts an intensive study of Troilus's language in Troilus and Criseyde, and uses this analysis to explain Troilus's character in terms of the overall moral of the poem. He first demonstrates that Chaucer gives Troilus the voice of a lover from medieval love poetry, which is not found in the voice of the character from the source. Three stylistic traits are recurrent in Troilus's language that characterize him as this type of lover: the "use of superlatives", the frequent use of "qualitative terms", and the "recurrence of long internal monologues". The author argues that by placing such an idealistic lover in a rather realistic setting, his character is occasionally ironic, but redeemable in the end. Troilus's use of language suggest that he thinks about and carefully chooses his words, arguing often in a more roundabout style than, say, Pandarus, who uses common idiomatic phrases. The author suggests that the care Chaucer takes in giving Troilus speeches which reflect the morality in situations simply through the use of language patterns reflects the fact that Chaucer means to present Troilus as a noble and worthy character. He also argues that Troilus uses language as a tool to separate himself from others: his unique language patterns reflect his feeling that he is unique in his sorrow, as well. The article is very well supported with textual evidence, though this is probably the only literature paper that I've read that includes calculations (for the percentage of time a character uses a particular type of phrase or a finite verb, etc.)

Available on JSTOR