Le verbe en friche: approches linguistiques et didactiques éd. par Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Sautot

Abstract

interprétations, est un guide aussi fantasque que le texte.Ainsi, il reste un autre travail d’érudition à faire sur ce texte surprenant afin d’en percer les nombreux secrets. On regrette que Bricout ne se soit pas lancée dans cette entreprise. Randolph College (VA) Françoise Watts Roubaud, Marie-Noëlle, et Jean-Pierre Sautot, éd. Le verbe en friche: approches linguistiques et didactiques. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87574-117-2. Pp. 254. 46 a. This volume includes a collection of papers presented at a conference organized by Episteverb, a team of nine French and Canadian academics working to examine and eventually improve upon French grammar instruction. Central to a more profound mastery of the French language is the verb—which seems to represent a dense and uncultivated notion in the minds of many students, both native and nonnative speakers of French. Paradoxically, as one author points out, evolving linguistic analyses seem to have only muddied the waters of grammar instruction rather than clarifying it. The twelve contributions are organized into three sections: the first section consists of four articles that present linguistic analyses or theoretical musings on specific verb constructions: Moncó Taracena discusses the status of clitic verb constructions such as s’en aller; Tsirlin considers the nature of nouns that appear as verbal complements with or without determiners (for example, faire [un] signe); Guehria assesses whether devenir should be deemed a linking verb by examining its compatibility with a range of attributive past participles; finally, Camus analyzes the interjection La ferme! All contributions are interesting but somewhat limited in scope and seemingly far-removed from the purported goals of rethinking French grammar instruction. The next sections, however, are more interesting and relevant to French language teachers. The four articles of the second section critique current pedagogical standards with respect to verb orientation (Deronne), conjugation paradigms (Germolimich and Stabarin), inversion (Roig), and verbal aspect and mood (Van Raemdonck and Meinertzhagen). Deronne presents anecdotal evidence that even college students struggle with the passive voice and examines how both reference grammars and grammar textbooks present this structure. Roig similarly points to inadequacies in the treatment of non-interrogative inversion in traditional grammar texts. Gerolimich and Stabarin propose a verb classification system based on oral forms and present the results of a study designed to evaluate how Italian-speaking learners of French apply this system when faced with new verbs. Van Raemdonck and Meinertzhagen suggest a new framework for approaching discussions of tense, mood, and aspect across various verbal constructions. The four articles that make up the third section all report on production data from French schoolchildren, with a great deal of overlap: Roubaud and Gomila, Lavieu-Gwodz, and Gourdet each discuss elementary school pupils’ 284 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 Reviews 285 responses to the question Qu’est-ce qu’un verbe?, with Roubaud and Gomila as well as Lavieu-Gwodz presenting the results of simple verb identification tasks. The final article by Sautot examines the use of complex verb forms (passé composé, faire causatif, venir de, and so on) in written production data from elementary and middle school students. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from several typographical and production errors.Although most are minor distractions that have no effect on meaning, some are more serious, including the transcription of one of the verbal stems of devoir as [dev] (rather than [dv]) in Gerolimich and Stabarin’s verb classification system, and reference in one article to bolded and italicized items in a table that has no such formatting. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis A. Kate Miller Sayahi, Lotfi. Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-11936-8. Pp. 251. $95. Sayahi’s volume provides a wealth of information regarding the present state of language contact and language change in a linguistically diverse region that includes areas of North Africa, Iberia, and the Maltese Islands. The book’s scope is significant, particularly because it covers a large geographic area and deals with a complex linguistic situation. Comprised of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, Sayahi’s study is a fresh look at diglossia and language...