Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat éd. par Jean-Marie Fournier, Aimée Lahaussois et Valérie Raby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat éd. par Jean-Marie Fournier, Aimée Lahaussois et Valérie Raby Bryan Donaldson Fournier, Jean-Marie, Aimée Lahaussois, et Valérie Raby, éd. Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat. ENS, 2019. ISBN 979-10-362-0085-4. Pp. 318. The list of Bernard Colombat's publications that opens the volume testifies to his productivity as a scholar, in areas including corpus linguistics, linguistic historiography, historical grammar (and historical grammars, especially of Latin), the diachrony of French, grammatical categories, and translation. To a large degree, these interests are reflected in the contents of this volume, whose 27 contributions center predominantly on French but also discuss other languages, from European languages, like Russian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek, to indigenous languages of the Americas. This review is by necessity not exhaustive. If I highlight certain contributions, it is not my intention to marginalize others. Fournier argues that Maupas's grouping of verbs into classes (by thematic vowel), a departure from his models, advanced the treatment of French grammar. Romanelli's discussion of seventeenth-century Italian grammars destined for French speakers reveals the longstanding concern to make language learning as painless as possible. Peters introduces us to the sixteenth-century philologist Conrad Gessner, source of early observations about social correlates of dialects. Kibbee discusses the grammarian Jean de Chabanel, a link between the Latin grammatical tradition and the French tradition instantiated for example by Vaugelas, from whom Chabanel's remarks often differ, reminding us of the artificiality of prescriptive norms. Mazière's contribution provides an introduction to the seventeenth-century grammarian Jean Macé, whose views similarly sometimes diverge from Vaugelas'. A glimpse of historical pedagogy appears in Archaimbault's analysis of Jean Sohier's eighteenth-century Russian method for French learners, with its use of the contrastive method. Clerico's contribution examines methods for teaching French pronunciation, through the intermediary of Latin, to English and German speakers at the end of the sixteenth century, revealing a clear awareness of the role of first-language transfer in language learning centuries before the advent of second language acquisition as a field of inquiry. Relatedly, Caron discusses an early phonetic alphabet and influences of French pronunciation on Latin pronunciation in France (including regional variation). Ayres-Bennett documents rare cases of women authors of grammatical works in the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries and also shows how women are somewhat present in grammatical works, albeit in a far more discrete way, as dedicatees, intended audiences, and sources of bon usage. Overall, the contributions question certain idées reçues in the field, emphasize how grammars and linguistic thought need to be understood in their historical context, remind us of the rich tradition of grammairiens aside from Vaugelas, and offer glimpses of tantalizing observations of—and reactions to—cases of historical linguistic contact. As with other such volumes, the interest of the contributions (admittedly a subjective measure) varies, as do their approaches and objectives. Nonetheless, readers with interests in historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, and socio-historical [End Page 287] linguistics—and especially readers with an interest in historical grammars—will find much stimulating reading. Bryan Donaldson University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French