Dénomination, phraséologie et référence ed. by Pierre Frath

Abstract

238 Reviews Coopers work therefore focuses on themanner inwhich postcolonial African writers tryto escape themetaphors of the West, steeped inprejudiced imaginaries. The material realities of the young emerging writers offer a wide range of alter native objects and traditions from which they can draw. While Cooper devotes three of the six close readings to twoNigerian authors?which at firstsight seems an uneven distribution of interests and a very liberal use of theword African' in her title?her close-knit, well-structured, and concrete insights into themateriality of liminal migrant spaces illustrate the hope inherent in new African writing, and constitute an affirmation of the Utopian trend inpostcolonial literary studies. University of Stirling Stefanie Van de Peer Denomination, phraseologie et reference. Ed. by Pierre Frath. Stuttgart: Steiner. 2008. 120 pp. 38. ISBN 978-3-515-09196-1. The mind-body distinction is an inadvertent error of the cognitive sciences. The dualism of body and mind has to be replaced with the notion of an I who speaks and thinkswithout relying on underlying rules, principles, andmechanisms. Gram mar does not have to relyon rules (it cannot be, ifthere isno mind to create them), but can be entirelybased on the observation of usage. Such are the extreme views of Pierre Frath, the editor of this tiny thirty-fifth Beiheft of thewell-established Zeitschriftfiirfranzosische Sprache und Literatur. Most linguists will find Frath's views mind-boggling?and if they happen to be convinced, it will have to be something else thatwas boggling when they firstread them. This reviewer, forone, remains unconvinced. The idea that, for thousands of years, grammarians (and linguists) have erred because theyhave chosen tofill their grammar books with rules and exceptions, is simply unfathomable. In recentwork on the verb commencer, I have coined theverb zinfer, conjugated in the imparfait. How could I have known that the appropriate third person singular was zinfait if I had not applied a rule? How can one rely on usage when there is no usage to be relied on? This isnot to say thatnothing is tobe learnt from the six papers brought together by the editor. They teach us that lots of rules, principles, and mechanisms thathave been formulated over the years, the decades, the centuries, are misguided. Some really do not go very far and are best abandoned. Many others are to be replaced or improved upon, reformulated with constant reference to usage, but they cannot be done away with. The volume's plat de resistance is by Georges Kleiber, who provides a paper on polysemy which underscores the need for a referential dimension, against many recent approaches, one ofwhich (byMarie-Luce Honeste, inApproche cognitive de la semantique lexicale, Synthese pour FHDR (Saint-Etienne: Universite JeanMon net, 2000)) is singled out for criticism. Pierre Frath himself asks what a linguistic approach based on denomination, reference, and usage should look like, and illus trates the approach he advocates through several examples taken from the general MLR, 105.1, 2010 239 area of phraseology, with special reference to French and English. Christopher Gledhill proposes an overarching analysis of 'faire+N' phrases (faire lafete,faire la java) within a usage-based Hallidayan framework; to complement this functional approach, he also investigates the same expressions from a semiotic viewpoint. Peter Blumenthal argues that the analysis of aword's combinatory profile typically provides clues about itsmeaning; whereas the question of what else contributes to a word's fullmeaning is leftunanswered, the point that scientific terms do not operate in the same way ismade quite forcefully.Taking into account more than twenty-five centuries of philosophical reflection, Francois Rastier concludes that, since meaning is neither part of the real world nor of the human psyche, ithas to be found in language as it is used, i.e. in texts that require interpretation. No empirical data are analysed, in contrast to Julien Longhi's contribution on lexical anticipation, which is also extremely theoretical but ends at least with a brief illustration using the author's research on the French word intermittentand some related neologisms (permittant and interluttant). Usage ismore important than ithas often been considered to be, especially in (some) contemporary theories of linguistics. Iwould be surprised, though, ifany of the scholars...