La quantification et ses domaines: actes du colloque de Strasbourg ed. by Catherine Schnedecker, Constanze Armbrecht

Abstract

bilabial stop (although any literate adult might believe that this word’s orthography perfectly reflects its pronunciation). The following chapter continues with the closely related topic of determining word boundaries in spoken language and teaching students to write correctly. This issue naturally raises questions of what constitutes a “word,” particularly in relation to compound nouns such as sac à dos, which students might attempt to spell as “sacados.” Pothier recommends helping students sort through their mental lexicons, trying to identify different phrases or expressions in which a word may appear (for example, sac-poubelle, sac de couchage). From these two initial chapters and their clear and concrete examples and implications , the book ventures into more abstract territory, discussing the arbitrary relationship between signifiant and signifié (to illustrate this point, Pothier presents the numerical systems of a handful of foreign languages); synonymy and polysemy; language functions (including communicative and cognitive, but also metalinguistic and poetic); and prescriptive linguistic norms. Pothier’s presentation of these concepts is clear and interesting, but their pedagogical implications seem a bit less clear. The final chapter presents a hodgepodge of well-established trucs concerning the teaching of French, including discussions of mute and aspirated h, invariable words, two-verb constructions (the second verb always appearing in its infinitival form, except for in compound tenses), and differences between the conditional and future forms. Although this book is primarily intended for teachers of French as a first language , the notion that language teachers who understand the inner workings of the language will be better equipped to anticipate and correct student errors certainly also holds for second language acquisition. Writing for her specific audience of French (language) school teachers, however, Pothier offers little in terms of practical advice for second language pedagogues. The issue of nonnative-speaking pupils is directly addressed in the discussion of phonetics/phonology and their relationship with orthography, but this issue is not pursued any further in subsequent chapters. With more advice specifically directed toward teachers of second language learners, Pothier could have greatly expanded her target audience. As it stands now, this book constitutes a fairly good introduction to some of the basic concepts of (French) linguistics but falls a bit short of making clear connections (beyond the most obvious ones) between the study of linguistics and language pedagogy. Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis A. Kate Miller SCHNEDECKER, CATHERINE, et CONSTANZE ARMBRECHT, éd. La quantification et ses domaines: actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 19–21 octobre 2006. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2443-6. Pp. 657. 100 a. Conference proceedings, like journals, fall into two categories: refereed and non-refereed. Those that are non-refereed, and thus include all papers that were presented at the conference, occasionally display a wide range of quality, both in terms of the research conducted and the presentation of that research. La quantification is a pleasant surprise in this regard, however. Despite being non-refereed and apparently all-inclusive, this volume attests to the care that was given to the choice of conference presenters; there is not a single article that is extraneous to the topic of quantification, and many complement one another in ways that suggest Reviews 1237 that their authors routinely interact at conferences and through other scholarly exchanges. The forty-nine articles included here deal with the semantic issue of quantification from a wide variety of perspectives (too many to summarize in a review), examining a variety of source languages including French (primarily), Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Korean and Romanian. Approximately 10% of the articles are written in English; the others are in French. The volume is subdivided into thematic units, including quantification, restriction, focalisation, totalisation; quantification via la prédication; quantification et négation. This organization allows the reader to find articles of interest among the many included. This is not a volume that one would read linearly, from cover to cover. There are, however, a plethora of articles, each different in its own way, which would interest a semanticist dealing with quantification. To the researcher working in this field, this volume offers a great deal. Because it contains conference proceedings, however, the articles are often short and at times somewhat undeveloped. Papers average...