Les Mécanismes linguistiques de l’évolution sémantique en français by Jacques Charles Lemaire

Abstract

532 Reviews near to what he wants to argue for, save that he does not care for deconstruction, he argues that everything in Derrida is inWittgenstein. But this means not seeing what was distinctive about the 'turn to theory' of the I970s: its anti-humanism, and emphasis on the constructed nature of what counts as the 'human'. Taking Saussure's semiology, he ignores Peirce's non-linguistically based semiotics, and so has nothing to say on Deleuze, who takes Peirce as his precedent. Lastly, his models of thought, while the essence of rationality, miss out something else in 'theory'-its political nature, its part in cultural politics. He quotes Gayatri Spivak that 'toembrace pluralism is to espouse the politics of themasculinist establishment. Pluralism is the method employed by the central authorities to neutralize opposition by seeming to accept it' (p. 242), and while he wishes to contest that argument, he does not quite have enough political address to reply to it. UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG JEREMY TAMBLING LesMcanismes linguistiquesde l'evolutionsemantiqueenfranfais. By JACQUES CHARLES LEMAIRE. Liege: Editions de l'Universit'ede Liege. 2004. i88 pp. ?23. ISBN 2 930322-76-4. This book is odd. When Iwas asked to review a book on 'the linguistic mechanisms of semantic evolution in French', I expected to receive something on the lines of Elizabeth Closs Traugott ('On Regularity of Semantic Change', Journal of Literary Semantics, I4 (i 985), I55-73) or Rebecca Posner (Linguistic Change inFrench (Oxford: Oxford University Press (I997)): that is, a re-evaluation of current trends in historical semantic theory using French as a case study. This book seems to have emerged instead from the passion for collecting and classifying lexical changes that pervaded much of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century semantics (and the term 'evolution' in the title fits inwell with the use of biological metaphors that pervaded nineteenth-century semantics). The result is not so much amonograph as a list. As such it cannot be used as an introduction to the mechanisms of semantic change; itmight, however, be of interest to like-minded enthusiasts; enthusiasts who, moreover, share the same 'jargon'. Readers are expected to know the meanings of many technical terms, such asmetatropy, metonomasia, paronymic attraction (which seems to be similar to folk etymology), etc., which are used from the start, listed in the index but defined only later in the book (see p. 95 for an explanation of paronymy and p. 97 for a definition of metatropy). Jacques Charles Lemaire states in the introduction that since the beginning of the twentieth century historical semantics has made considerable progress. He refers mainly toVincent Nyckees's La Semantique (Paris: Belin, I998). However, itmight have been helpful to hear a bit more about this progress and to know inwhat way this book fits into the evolving field of historical linguistics in general and historical semantics in particular. The third paragraph of the introduction talks about the 'psychological' mecha nisms of analogy (referring to the neo-grammarians) and to 'intellectual association'. This would have been a good place to introduce some overview of what has been achieved in recent years in the field of 'cognitive linguistics', which, after all, deals with 'psychological' or 'intellectual' mechanisms of language change. One of Lemaire's main sources of inspiration isAntoine Meillet's seminal article 'Comment les mots changent de sens' (Annee sociologique, 9 (1905-06), I-38), in which Meillet distinguished between system-internal constraints on semantic change or the relationship between words and words; system-external influences based on the relationship between words and objects; and system-external influences based MLR, IOI.2, 2006 533 on the uses speakers of different social groups make of words. Lemaire's book focuses on the first, i.e. on the linguistic mechanisms of semantic change or what he calls the 'intrinsic functioning of (a) language' ('De la langue', p. 7). What are these 'linguistic' factors of semantic change? Lemaire distinguishes be tween three general categories: (i) those having to do with semantic links between words, such as synonymy and borrowing; (2) those having to do with the (phonetic or graphic) form of lexical units or their 'identity' (as in the case of homonymy) or their...