L’émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français by Magali Rouquier

Abstract

Reviews 289 the book’s mission to rethink the history of French, appears to be creating different or larger frameworks for contextualizing the development of the French language. Lodge leads off with a discussion—and subsequent dismantling—of language myths that seem to dominate previous approaches. Buridant argues for studying the history of French within a larger group of all Romance languages, against which the unique linguistic innovations of French (for example, the two-pronged negation system or indefinite on) become more apparent. In two later chapters that may have been better situated earlier in the book, Lusignan guides the reader through some key works on the history of French leading up to the current historical sociolinguistic approach, and Cohen discusses the validity and consequences of the different systems that were used in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France to classify its languages. Interspersed with these contributions are a few chapters that examine specific instances of variation. Two chapters discuss variation within the Anglo-Norman dialect spoken in England during the Middle Ages: Trotter considers whether an orthographic alternation (-aun- /-an-) in fourteenth-century legal documents points to regional variation within the language. Kristol argues that some of the seemingly erroneous phonetic transcriptions given in the early fifteenth-century Anglo-Norman pedagogical text Femina provide valuable insight into variations in pronunciation. In a later chapter, Ernst similarly analyzes the so-called mistakes found in personal correspondence among less educated groups—namely, nineteenth-century French and Italian soldiers or emigrants. The final chapter of the volume considers an increasing homogenization in French pronunciation across the Hexagon, in contrast with the clearly delineated accents of England’s major cities. The volume also includes two other chapters that do not seem to fit into these two main categories. A very short piece by Iliescu traces the development and grammaticalization of the definite article from Late Latin. A chapter by Bauer discusses the evolving diglossic relationship between French and Italian in the bilingual Aosta Valley. Overall, although it does not necessarily present a coherent picture of what it means to rethink the history of the French language, the book does include some thought-provoking insights and observations. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis A. Kate Miller Rouquier, Magali. L’émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3032-9. Pp. 205. 29 a. Copious examples and careful examinations of text structure and pragmatic properties characterize this tightly-focused monograph on three word order constructions in Old and Middle French. Specifically, the author seeks to trace the emergence and diachronic development of the c’est-cleft (C’est Pierre qui s’en occupe), the pseudocleft (Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est la diachronie), and what the author labels, for lack of an established term, a construction liée (C’est une belle fleur que la rose). These structures are interesting because they differ both syntactically and discourse-pragmatically from “canonical” subject-verb main declarative clauses. The opening chapter overviews earlier work on these constructions, combining description with theoretical critiques. The author also issues the standard but crucial caveat that, when analyzing historical data, native speaker intuitions are by definition no longer available. This difficulty in large part underlies the second chapter, where the author provides diagnostics for teasing apart true clefts from numerous sequences that superficially resemble clefts but cannot be properly analyzed as such. Although this chapter highlights the difficulties encountered in historical data, it testifies to the author’s rigor in selecting (and excluding) data for analysis and leaves the reader confident in the data collection methods. Chapter 3, devoted to the c’est-cleft, revisits debates on the nature of the subject pronoun ce and presents a carefully organized series of instantiations of the c’est-cleft in Old and Middle French. Although each subtype of cleft (for example, temporal adverbial clefts, prepositional clefts, causal clefts) is clearly illustrated with one or more examples, low overall token counts preclude anything beyond an elementary diachrony of the emergence of clefts in Old and Middle French. Chapter 4 reveals that pseudo-clefts, as instantiated in modern French, emerged only in the middle...