International audienceCoreference chains in French short narratives : a diachronic study (13th-16th c.) This paper investigates coreference chains in a corpus of short humorous narrative texts in French from the early 13th to the mid-15th century. The study is restricted to human referents. Using ANALEC to manually encode our description, we analyze our data by means of the TXM software. The study establishes the variation parameters that allow for a comparison of our results with the results obtained in other studies: so-called 'referential density', the number of chains, their lengths, the referential stability coefficient or the variety in the denominations of the referents, the grammatical category of the links in the coreferential chai...