Gender Assignment and Word-final Pronunciation in French: Two Semantic Systems by Margaret À. Beckett

Abstract

Céleste’s heart because he is not a fighter. He has not invested in his négritude, or overcome his unemployment. Instead, he has resigned himself to seeing his job loss as an indication of the rise in power accorded to “les Maghrébins” (184). Both Elliott’s and Elio’s self-centeredness compel Céleste to disappear. Too late, they each realize their behavioral errors, and resolve to win her back. Despite the novel’s initial status as a complicated love story told in the firstperson by Cassandra, Céleste’s best friend, Bamako Climax becomes a murder mystery and novel of suspense in its second half. Third-person narration predominates in the investigation of the plane crash claiming the life of Elio’s sister. Moreover, the omniscient narrator is better suited for telling the story of Elio’s and Elliott’s convergence in Bamako as they pursue Céleste through her journalistic activities aimed at uncovering a continent-wide conspiracy for providing Islamic terrorist organizations with young African recruits. The third-person account provides more credibility in the disclosure of the negotiations and hardships that each man faces in inquiring where in Africa Céleste has been sighted, which is information beyond Cassandra’s purview. Nevertheless, Cassandra reappears twice in the last seventy pages of Bamako climax in order to resume her first-person narration. This causes the reader to rethink her contribution to the novel. Although Cassandra could not know every tip presented in the suspenseful chapters, her tying up the threads of the story makes sense, as she finally admits to being a better person herself because of Céleste. In the penultimate chapter, Cassandra even speculates about what Céleste’s place would have been in “la mythologie grecque” (396). From this point forward, one identifies Cassandra as the oracle for the entire novel, although her abrasive personality has kept the reader at a distance. Through her, one glimpses a rewritten mythology in which women hold men in their power. Tchoungui’s hierarchy reaffirms itself in the novel’s final chapter as epilogue, which predicts the nature of racial relations in the future. University of Texas, El Paso Jane E. Evans Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns BECKETT, MARGARET À. Gender Assignment and Word-final Pronunciation in French: Two Semantic Systems. Munich: Lincom, 2010. ISBN 907-8-38958-696-79. Pp. 836. 89 a. If grammatical gender in French were rule-based and thus predictable, applications of such a model would be of great interest to linguists and teachers, not to mention to French students. Through an analysis of terms denoting birds, fish, other members of the animal realm, plants and human beings, Beckett provides compelling evidence that words’ meanings constrain both grammatical gender and word-final phones. The resulting lists of features associated with masculine versus feminine gender and consonant- versus vowel-final words resembles the noun classification systems of non-European noun class languages. Beckett’s thorough analysis indicates that nouns that do not connote gender directly, for example, un coq versus une poule, have semantic properties related to feminine or masculine grammatical genders. The trait “open,” for instance, is Reviews 603 argued to be associated with feminine gender. Une baie, for example, opens to surrounding waters, whereas un lac, which is landlocked, is “closed” and masculine . Other attributes are analyzed as being associated with words ending in a pronounced vowel (“rough skin,” like cornichon) versus a pronounced consonant (“smooth skin,” like banane). Of course, most words have multiple traits of this kind. Therefore, these attributes are said to be ranked in terms of saliency. For example , although une autruche is “flightless,” which is related to masculine gender, it is more importantly the largest of all birds and thus “unique,” a feminine property. Variable rankings of such attributes account for words that take both genders, words that have historically changed genders, and cases in which grammatical gender does not match with semantic gender (for example, une victime for a masculine victim). In this analysis, these properties frequently take on the form of oppositions between semantic features asserted to extend to other lexical fields and, possibly, to the organization of nominal classifications in other...