Analyses de l’interaction et linguistique: état actuel des recherches en français ed. by Véronique Traverso

Abstract

Reviews 201 standardized writing system of Reunionese Creole and the stigmatization of Réunion Creole when compared to metropolitan French. In another article, Simonin analyses linguistic hybridization through cross-cultural misunderstandings between a Reunion island wife and her “z’oreil” (45) husband, a metropolitan French speaker. The analysis of their interactions shows code-switching, creolization and language métissage, such as the husband’s use of the intensifier marker même as used in Reunionese Creole, as in “Je l’ai acheté même.” It should be noted that many of the articles touch upon the dominant position of the French language in schools and the minority status of Creole, a topic that is still current. Simonin compelled the field of French linguistics to consider approaches developed on the other side of the Atlantic, and this book reflects his contributions to the field. He was a pioneer who looked at the field of sociolinguistics as a carrefour discipline connecting linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and many other domains. While this méli-mélo of texts gives an overview of the trajectory of a seminal researcher in sociolinguistics, some of the texts are more general and may not be appropriate for scholars or students of linguistics. On a more positive note, this sampling of texts offers an honest, humanistic, and organic view of an important scholar’s career and highlights the impact that he had on the field of French sociolinguistics. Manhattan College (NY) Samira Hassa Traverso, Véronique, éd. Analyses de l’interaction et linguistique: état actuel des recherches en français. Langue française 175 (2012). ISSN 0023-8368. Pp. 151. 18 a. This collection of seven articles presents a sampling of current linguistic research on interaction in French—what the author calls “le champ interactionniste”—for a Francophone audience. It thus is similar in purpose to the recent special issue of Nottingham French Studies (FR 86.3), the main differences being the language of presentation and a greater emphasis on methods of Conversation Analysis in the Nottingham volume. Traverso opens the volume with a brief but informative introduction to the field,beginning with a chronology of principal research since its inception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a brief exposition of recent methodological trends, such as the development of large collective corpora and databases and multimodal approaches (for example, the study of gestures, gaze, and posture is made possible by improved video recording techniques). She also presents certain themes that permeate the volume, despite the contributions’diversity with respect to the methodology and nature of the particular object of study. The highlighted themes include (i) the temporal nature of discourse, as participants configure their productions in real time to respond to actions of their co-participants; (ii) sequentiality or the extension of the object of analysis beyond the adjacency pair of conversation analysis to include the organization of the turn or of longer sequences of discourse; (iii) the importance of frameworks and spaces in which interactions occur, including elements such as gesture, gaze, posture and movement and their interrelations with speech and with each other; and (iv) the centrality of issues of identity, where identities are seen as (co-)constructed and negotiated through interaction. Diverse types of interactive situations provide data for analysis. For example, classroom interactions are studied in relation to“information saturation”(Grobet);“long sequences”and the negotiation of participant frameworks are examined in a video recording of a meeting with thirty participants (Traverso); identity construction is studied in transcripts of focus groups of prospective same-sex parents (Galatolo and Greco); and analysis of a video recording of a guided tour of an experimental garden reveals the systematic integration of multimodal and linguistic resources in the introduction of new referents (Mondada). The most interesting contribution is Laforest’s two-dimensional analysis of midwife-client consultations in Quebec,in which the interactive dimension strongly resembles doctorpatient interactions, while the discursive dimension reveals the midwives’ attempt to clearly distinguish themselves from doctors; consideration of both dimensions allows for a richer understanding of the place of the midwives at the larger social level, namely that they are still struggling to achieve legitimization of their profession. The volume...