French Syntax Research Articles

”Not a trouble”: A mixed-method study of autism-related language preferences by French-Canadian adults from the autism community

Finding a consensual term for persons diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder has recently been debated in the scientific literature. Considering the stigma associated with using terms deemed offensive, it is paramount to address autism respectfully and consensually. As of now, this study is the first to consult French-Canadian participants beyond autistic people themselves. This mixed-method study aimed to document and understand the preference and offensiveness of terms used to refer to persons living with autism. Participants ( N = 327) were adults who self-identified as part of the autism community (i.e., autistic person, family or friends, professionals, or clinicians). By means of an online survey, they rated and ranked six terms used to designate an autistic person. Participants also explained their ranking. Results show no consensus for the use of any one specific term. A clear dichotomy appears between autistic adults’ and professionals’ preferences in terminology. The latter prioritized terms related to the medical model, whereas autistic persons preferred using identity-related language. Among all respondents, Autistic person was the most preferred and least offensive term. Thus, we suggest asking for the concerned person's preference whenever possible or using terminology preferred by the majority when this cannot be done. Lay abstract Recent studies and editorials by autism researchers suggest distancing ourselves from the medical terms used to name autism. Considering the stigma associated with using terms deemed offensive and the influence culture has on language, it is paramount to address autism respectfully and consensually in a culturally sensitive way. As of now, data on the French-Canadian population has yet to be collected. Participants ( N = 327) who self-identified as part of the autism community (i.e., autistic person, family or friends, professionals, or clinicians) completed an online survey. They rated and ranked six terms used to designate an autistic person. Participants also explained their ranking. Among all respondents, Autistic person was the most preferred and least offensive term by most respondents. An apparent dichotomy appears between autistic adults’ and professionals’ preferences in terminology. The latter prioritized terms related to the medical model, whereas autistic persons preferred using identity-related language. However, considering the French syntax, the latter justified their preference based on identity-first and person-first principles. Because results show no consensus for one term, we suggest asking for the concerned person's preference whenever possible or using terminology preferred by the majority when this can’t be done.

Microvariation and Change in the Romance Left Periphery

AbstractDespite the vast literature which has accrued on the fine structure of the Romance left periphery, there exists no diachronic account of the emergence of the considerable microvariation between Romance varieties today. Focussing in particular on the syntax of French and Venetan varieties, this article suggests that certain northern Romance varieties have diverged maximally from an Early Medieval Romance norm in which each left-peripheral Head attracts a wide variety of suitable Goals for movement, unlike the ‘innovative’ Romance grammars which emerge in the post-medieval period where the suitable class of Goals becomes restricted along categorial or information-structural grounds. The account predicts that the most ‘conservative’ Modern Romance grammars allow widespread argument fronting via movement, whereas their most ‘innovative’ counterparts show heavy restrictions on such operations.

Old French Si, Syntax and Function in Diachrony

This article offers a diachronic analysis of the Old French particle si. Using data from both verse and prose texts, I analyse the function and syntax of si from the 12th to 14th centuries. I find that si fulfills a variety of functions throughout the period, beginning as a subject continuity marker before acquiring functions as a resumptive and an expletive among others. Si’s syntax is defined by its proximity to the verb, occupying the specifier of the left-peripheral head which hosts the verb. This head changes through the Old French period from the lower left peripheral head Fin to the higher head Force. These findings are shown to have ramifications for the study of Medieval Romance syntax and discourse particles.

Paraphrase and parallel treebank for the comparison of French and Chinese syntax

AbstractThis paper proposes to study the contrastive syntax of French and Chinese through the lens of syntactic mismatches, and by making use of parallel treebanks. A syntactic mismatch is the non-similarity between the syntactic structures of one linguistic unit and its translation. Syntactic mismatches are formalized using the notion of paraphrase from the Meaning-Text Theory, which allows for capturing mismatches at different levels of the linguistic description (e.g. Semantic, Deep-Syntactic, and Surface-Syntactic). In this paper, we report in details on the types of paraphrases found in the seed corpus used, demonstrating that the Deep-Syntactic paraphrases constitute the best starting point for our study. Then, we show how, starting from the seed corpus, we semi-automatically constructed a multi-layer parallel treebank with the alignment and annotation of paraphrases.

Samuel N. Rosenberg (1936–2020)

Samuel N. Rosenberg (1936–2020) Christopher Callahan Samuel Nathan Rosenberg was born January 19, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Israel and Etta Friedland Rosenberg, and the brother of Alex Rosenberg and Sylvia Rosenberg Fogelman. He died on June 30, 2020 at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, at the age of 84. Sam seems to have been destined for the Academy from his earliest years. He was an avid reader even before primary school and began learning French in the first grade, later taking first prize in a city-wide competition for excellence in French. Multilingualism came naturally to him: exposed to Yiddish from infancy, pressed into learning Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, and constantly pursuing French, his command of the most refined stylistic registers in French received plaudits in mid-life from no less erudite a scholar than Michel Zink of the Collège de France (and now of the Académie française). He pursued French Studies, along with Italian and Latin, at Columbia College, receiving his A.B. in 1957 with "Highest Honors, Distinction in French"—noted in English, despite the Latin text of the rest of the diploma! While at Columbia, he worked at WKCR, the campus radio station, and his "mellifluous FM dj voice" made a lasting impression on everyone who met him. Click for larger view View full resolution Sam in 1962. Courtesy estate of Samuel N. Rosenberg. His insatiable curiosity was matched by a strong sense of ethics. Colleagues have since described him as "a champion of human rights and empathetic to a fault," qualities for which he was well-known by everyone he worked with. Indeed, he is described by his collaborators as "the ultimate gentleman—affable, courteous, distinguished—and an unstinting mentor." Equally erudite and [End Page 355] humble, he was gifted with "an incomparable sense of generosity and camaraderie." Click for larger view View full resolution Sam in 2016. Photo by Chris Callahan. Sam's decision to pursue his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins was doubtless influenced by the migration to Hopkins of his mentor Dr. Nathan Edelman, who had become chair of Romance Languages there the previous year. Once enrolled, he met his most formative—and formidable—mentor in Dr. Anna Granville Hatcher, who directed his dissertation. Sam later recalled her course in Old Provençal, taken in his first semester at Hopkins, as a baptism by fire, which nonetheless gave him a methodology for dissecting ancient languages in the minutest detail and a holistic grasp of both the source literary text and its cultural context. Sam went on to impart this approach to philology to his own students and to live it in the collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship which marked his career. As Sam was drawn to both historical and modern grammar and stylistics, his dissertation focused on modern French syntax because, in Sam's words, "Miss Hatcher explained that Miss Pope [From Latin to Old French] had said it all"; with time he realized that wasn't the case, but more on that below. His dissertation research was facilitated by a Fulbright to study in Paris in 1960–1961. He described his great fortune at being able to stay in the apartment, situated Place de Furstemberg in the St. Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, of the celebrated composer/pianist Alexander Tcherepnin and his wife, Ming, also a concert pianist. Sam's arrival and the Tcherepnins' departure overlapped by one week, during which evenings filled with music, wine, and scintillating conversation stretched into the wee hours. In 1962, Sam took a lectureship at Indiana University, earning the rank of Assistant Professor in 1965 upon receipt of his Ph.D. [End Page 356] in Romance Philology. His dissertation, Modern French 'ce': The Neuter Pronoun in Adjectival Predication, published in 1970, was in fact not his first book-length work. Two years earlier, he had offered the English-speaking world a translation of Antoine Meillet's groundbreaking The Indo-European Dialects, a publication which both signaled his ongoing interest in historical linguistics and opened for him a scholarly path in translation; he remained active in both of these fields for the rest of his life. Sam's training and...

Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie par Giovanni Dotoli

Reviewed by: Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie par Giovanni Dotoli H. Jay Siskin Dotoli, Giovanni. Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie. L'Harmattan, 2019. ISBN 978-2-343-18431-9. Pp. 215. Dotoli's volume conforms to a familiar genre of prescriptivism: the integrity of French is being undermined by lexical borrowings from English. The title recalls du Bellay's 1549 manifesto, in which the author vaunts the French language as equal to Latin and Greek in expressive power. In no sense does du Bellay claim that French must commit violence against the classical languages in order to assure its survival. Deviating from du Bellay's careful expression, Dotoli's volume exhibits a lexical slippage in his use of the verb défendre. He takes us from rational argument to an almost apocalyptic battle between French and English. Dotoli's volume has numerous historical precedents. Étiemble's 1964 Parlez-vous franglais? is an influential title. Like subsequent works, Étiemble condemns lexical borrowings. More recent authors (Hagège and Rey, for example), have associated borrowings at the word level with a larger project of cultural appropriation. The widespread use of an English technological lexicon signifies a capitulation to American cultural ideals of capitalism and the goal of economic imperialism. Borrowings are not innocent but rather signify an allegiance to an alternative worldview. Dotoli's expression elevates this perceived issue to an existential crisis. In my view, these borrowings simply represent the natural evolution of languages, where any number of factors, from lexical gaps to perceived prestige, influence usage. The examples cited by Dotoli reflect the appeal of American youth culture as well as technological innovation in many cases. The field of advertising has been particularly vulnerable, with borrowings from English signifying that the product is "buzzy." Many of his examples are unknown to me or have passed from usage, indicating the ephemeral or superficial nature of these items. Dotoli also claims that English is influencing French syntax, shown by a preference for the passive over the active voice. Quel est ton nom? is an Anglicism replacing s'appeler. He offers no empirical proof, nor does he account for internal linguistic factors such as analogy. Moreover, the utilitarian Anglo-American "Globish" is lexically impoverished, poorly written and spoken. English is infecting Europe like the AIDS virus (yes, really!) that tricks defensive T-cells into destroying national languages. Europe will be unilingual if it does not boost its defense system. How might this be accom-plished? Dotoli makes an appeal to la Francophonie, following the lead of other authors. The Francophonie construct provides a space for pluralism. It is a place of cultural encounters, linguistic dynamism, and unity in diversity: "[Elle] se bat contre une langue unique, une culture unique et une pensée unique" (104). This volume follows the lines sketched out by a number of previous authors. It distinguishes itself (nega tively) by its combativeness and alarmist scenarios. On the positive side, Dotoli proposes over 75 concrete plans of action to promote the status of French. I have never seen a similar variety and specificity, and we can be grateful that this author supplements the scholarship with new voices. Que la défense avance! [End Page 281] H. Jay Siskin University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

The Development of Exceptional Case Marking in Romance with a Particular Focus on French

Abstract This paper traces the development of so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) under perception, permissive and causative verbs in Romance. Synchronically, we can observe various patterns in the distribution of ECM complements under these verbs. In Portuguese and Spanish, ECM is often possible under all permissive and causative verbs, whereas in French, Catalan and Italian it is usually restricted to perception and permissive verbs. A detail that has not been much discussed is the fact that, for many speakers, ECM with a given verb is often restricted to contexts in which the embedded ‘subject’ is a clitic. Some speakers of Modern French display this pattern with the verb faire ‘make’, for example (Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Philip Miller. 1997. Les causatives en français : Un cas de compétition syntaxique. Langue Française 115. 62–74. https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1997.6222). In this paper, I claim that laisser ‘let’ probably also displayed this pattern in Middle French. In Old French, however, what appears to be the opposite pattern is observed. Following (Pearce, Elizabeth. 1990. Parameters in Old French syntax: Infinitival complements. Dordrecht: Kluwer), I attribute this to the morphological variability of dative case in Old French. I propose a case-based analysis of the clitic ECM pattern, whereby ECM complements in Romance are phases unlike clause union complements (see Sheehan, Michelle & Sonia Cyrino. 2018. Why do some ECM verbs resist passivisation? A phase-based explanation. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 48 (vol 3), 81–90. University of Massachusetts). Where such complements are embedded under light verbs, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken hale: A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) prevents accusative case from being assigned to the lower subject except in instances of cliticization. When the matrix verb is reanalysed as a full verb, however, v becomes the case-assigning head and so ECM becomes generally available, regardless of the clitic/non-clitic status of the causee.

Nguyen Phan Long's Le roman de mademoiselle Lys: "L'éducation de nos filles" in Colonial French Indochina

This article examines the problematization of, and the proposed solutions to, cultural métissage in the first published Vietnamese Francophone novel, Le roman de mademoiselle Lys (1921). It investigates how the author, Nguyen Phan Long, founder of the Constitutionalist Party of Cochinchina, uses French syntax as a rhetorical means of disciplining Vietnamese women in French Indochina. I interpret his use of French literary traditions of novelistic and fictionalized diary-writing to impose Confucian ideals on Vietnamese women, and read his mirroring of French "diary-novels" as a reflection of his desire to respond to journaux-romans and their French male authors.

Jean does the dishes while Marie fixes the car: a qualitative and quantitative study of social gender in French syntax articles

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of gender bias observed in constructed examples of French syntax articles. Drawing our inspiration from Macaulay and Brice (1997) and Pabst et al. (2018)’s studies of English, we investigate the way women and men are depicted in constructed examples in syntax articles in French. We looked at grammatical functions, thematic roles and lexical choices and found a strong male bias in the use of gendered noun phrases (i.e. more references to men than to women; men are more likely to be in a subject position as well as being referred to via pronouns, and more likely to be agents and experiencers). Furthermore, women and men are not related to the same lexical choices. Besides, since French is a grammatical gender language where masculine gender can also be intended as gender neutral, we designed a second study to investigate masculine marked noun phrases (ambiguous masculines, AMs). When we compared AM noun phrases to female and male arguments in terms of grammatical functions and thematic roles, we found that, in production, they were different than true masculines. We discuss the implications of our results for the meaning of ‘gender neutral masculines’ and for practices anchoring gender discrimination.

On the syntax of spoken French

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the research carried out by theGroupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe(GARS, Aix-Marseille University), in the field of spoken French description. Our framework explicitly states the need for two independent but related levels of grammatical description, namely themicrosyntacticandmacrosyntacticlevels. Elaborating a twofold model has allowed us to propose a descriptive method differing from traditional sentence-based analyses, which raise considerable difficulties, especially in the domain of spoken language description. Regarding the “maximal-units” of syntactic description, our framework suggests that two different kinds of units should be postulated: Government-Units and Utterance-Units. The paper illustrates the distinction between the micro- and macro-syntactic components by introducing examples mostly drawn from spoken French corpora.

Postposition of the Subject in Contemporary French: An Exploration of Medium, Register and Genre

Postposition of the subject has been widely explored in the French language but only rarely in relation to the oral medium. It is strongly associated with written discourse of a more formal variety. Through an analysis of a corpus of oral narratives, this paper analyses postposition of the subject in contemporary French syntax and its relationship to questions of medium, register and genre. The paper explores the extent to which postposition occurs in the oral medium, incorporating findings from conversational narratives, traditional stories and contemporary storytelling. It analyses the typology of the most frequent types of example, the reasons why these types of postposition might occur in the discourse in question, and the extent to which questions of medium, register and genre play a role. The paper also discusses the implications for the future of this structure in oral varieties of French.

Fragmented adverbial clauses as resources for negotiating alignment: concessive repair patterns in French talk-in-interaction

The study presented in this paper aims at investigating the French adverbial conjunction mais ‘but’/‘although’ by means of a recently compiled corpus of World French. The study will describe and analyze two types of turn-final mais used in concessive repair constructions which have not been described in research on French syntax so far. These two uses of concessive mais exhibit subtle differences in their syntactic make-up but also in their sequential behavior in interaction (other-initiated down-toning of an overstatement vs. self-initiated down-toning of the relevance of an argument). Both the constructional and the sequential characteristics of the two patterns with turn-final mais will be discussed against the backdrop of a cross-linguistic comparison with English but and Finnish mutta ‘but’, with regard to similarities and differences between the uses of this lexical item in different languages. Both the analysis of French mais and its comparison with its English and Finnish counterparts support the conclusion that fragmented adverbial clauses can be used as resources for negotiating alignment in talk-in-interaction.

Modularer Ausgleich an der Schnittstelle

The present article considers the interaction between the discourse and the syntax of Middle French, analyzing the relation between the complexity of different types of discourse and the means of syntactic expression. It further studies the connection between different genres and different discourse relations. As for the latter, the results reveal an interaction between the complexity of a narrative with respect to the different subordinated events and the depth of the discursive narration measured in terms of the frequency of the complex discourse types. Our hypothesis with respect to Middle French is that there exists a balance between complex and less complex means of expression of the different modules: The interaction between the structure of the plot and the different types of discourse on the one hand and that between the syntax and the types of discourse on the other hand is balanced. It follows from our analysis that complex means of expressions are avoided in syntactic or textual domains if the writer produces rather complex discursive structures. French has the need to maintain a balance between complex and less complex means of expression in the different modules (syntax and pragmatics), an assumption which may also be important for future research on linguistic change.

Use of Theater for a Sustainable Improvement of Written & Oral Skills: A Sample Activity Realized with Molière's Plays

When training language teachers, it is necessary to plan a continuous development and improvement of written and oral skills, especially in the case of some teacher candidates who had not have the opportunity to study abroad, in countries where the foreign language that they are supposed to teach is spoken by native speakers. Therefore, for a sustainable improvement of the skills mentioned above, some practical activities have been planned and realized, in the scope of certain courses such as French Syntax and French Literature given in French teacher training Department of Istanbul University, during the academic year of 2013-2014. So, the main objective of this paper is to present an applied study, realized in French Literature course with students of the French Language Teacher Training Department of Hasan Ali Yucel Education Faculty in Istanbul University. The study consists of four steps which are reading, rewriting, adaptation and staging of plays of the famous French writer Molière. Within the context of this study, two plays adapted by the students and the achievements obtained will be presented.

Pour en finir avec la langue de Shakespeare par Jean-Luc Jeener, and: La langue française: chef-d’œuvre en péril par Paul-André Maur

Reviews 217 in discursive structures that are beyond the sentential pragma-syntactic level.Another chapter,by Maria Polinksy and Eric Potsdam,contains a universal hierarchical structure study of a Russian syntactic minimal pair, which contrasts with Lambrecht’s theoretical perspective on sentence focus (1994). Incorporating Lambrecht’s perspective on sentence focus, Cinzia Russi’s chapter analyzes subject-verb inversion and genericity to explain the status of two Italian unaccusatives. The second section of the book deals with several topics in French syntax, the area of Lambrecht’s expertise. The chapters analyze topics such as the connection between information structure and prosody (Caroline Féry), the various discourse paradigms of the lexeme pourquoi and the structures to which this lexeme is connected (Lindy Myers and Stéphanie Pellet), the role of information structure in second language processing (Robert Reichle), and the influence of prosody and typological factors on the well-formedness of two constructions in French and English: it-clefts and c’est-clefts (Stacey Katz Bourns). The final chapter, by Betsy Kerr, discusses the complementary nature of Information Structure and Interactional Linguistics with regard to the phenomenon of left dislocation in spoken French. With its diverse topics and approaches, this tribute to Lambrecht will be of great interest to linguists who study the interconnected phenomena of pragmatics, syntax,and discourse.Continuing a line of research that uses and enriches the Information Structure framework and containing a section that deals exclusively with French constructions, this volume could be a valuable addition to the reading lists of graduate students in French linguistics. With their novel theoretical and applied insights, these papers take the contribution of the Construction Grammar framework for linguistic analysis in a new and interesting direction. University of Delaware Ali Alalou Jeener, Jean-Luc. Pour en finir avec la langue de Shakespeare. Neuilly: Atlande, 2014. ISBN 978-2-35030-261-4. Pp. 160. 15 a. Maur, Paul-André. La langue française: chef-d’œuvre en péril.Versailles:Via Romana, 2014. ISBN 979-10-90029-74-3. Pp. 150. 16 a. These two volumes represent the most recent instantiations of the prescriptive impulse that has informed French language usage over the centuries.Voiture’s defense of the conjunction car (1637) may be considered among the earliest exemplars of this linguistic dirigisme. The legitimization of this three-letter word is but a skirmish in the full-fledged offensive against barbarismes and lexical borrowings from English, a battle waged primarily by French intellectuals, with tepid support from linguists. Both works echo Étiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? (1964); despite his fulminations against the invasion of le sabir atlantique, its usage has become more widespread, this due to technological advances and the embrace of a global English (globish), whose usage signifies nothing less than American cultural imperialism. Jeener, a prominent figure in French theater and a reviewer for Le Figaro,is particularly outraged by the Loi Fiaroso (2013), which authorized the use of English in certain French university settings. Jeener’s histrionic scenario evokes centuries-old events to support his enmity toward the Anglo-American language. Is not the perfidy of English speakers illustrated by the burning of Jeanne d’Arc and the exile of Napoleon? Did not the intervention of the French military in the American Revolution ruin the treasury of Louis XVI and precipitate the French uprising and the end of the monarchy? Jeener slips easily from attacks on the English language to condemnations of radical Islam and Nazism.Granted, his screed may be contextualized as part of the series“Coup de gueule et engagement,” a favored site for outspoken opinion. However, I cannot resist savoring the irony that his tract was published by a press that boasts of being le leader in its category. His strategy for defending the French language is sadly unoriginal and inefficacious: it relies on the abstract notion of francophonie. Presumably a current of purist linguistic usage present in the former French colonies and those countries where French is (was?) the prestige language will reinforce the cultural particularism and support the integrity of this language under attack. In fact, the linguistic variation found in these countries hardly supports the advancement of a monolithic“classical”French. It...

Separation and Cohesion: Cognitive Plane of Study (on the Material of French Syntax)

This article focuses on the problem of syntactic separation and cohesion in the new focus of researches: in terms of cognitive analysis. The mechanisms of formation, perception and interpretation of knowledge based on two opposite, by their essence, syntactic categories like separation and cohesion, were investigated on the material of modern French language. It was established that cohesion represents the syntactic structures of classic syntax that exist on the mental level as independent grammatical integrities, as integrated integrities, as schematic models. Based on the principles of logic, normativity, syntactic hierarchy, they form primarily analytical thinking of recipients. Separation, representing syntactic structures of actualizing syntax, is characterized by non-standard syntactic constructions, high expression of utterance, expansion of its informative borders. Based on the principle of language economy, separation is an effective means of information’s assimilation. Separate structures develop not only mental, but also emotional sphere of perception and interpretation of utterance by the speaker. We proved that cohesive or separate syntactic structures are activated depending on the cultural and historical period, and in their synthesis, they are the significant factors in the organization, development and evaluation of semantic space of the text in cognitive plane.

Décrire le français en relation aux langues en contact

It is not possible to explain what happens to French syntax in a situation of close contact with one or more languages, solely in terms of French. How then can we describe French in relation to the languages in contact? We first discuss the early research of Gabriel Manessy and their development by a number of linguists, and later show the importance of exploring several properties of the constructions under study in comparing languages, in order to place them within the context of general language processes. Furthermore, we will insist on the need to go beyond the forms at issue by focusing on their behavior. The examples will be taken from Ivory Coast French, which, ever since its establishment, has been in contact with the languages of the vast Niger-Congo family, in particular Jula and Baule (which have themselves been in contact for several centuries).

Constructions en changement: hommage à Paul Hirschbühler ed. by Monique Dufresne

Dufresne, Monique, éd. Constructions en changement: hommage à Paul Hirschbühler. Québec: PU de Laval, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7637-8936-1. Pp. 209. $30 Can. This volume serves a dual purpose: to present four papers on French historical grammar from the ongoing corpus and research project Modéliser le changement: les voies du français (Martineau and others), and to honor Hirschbühler—himself a participant in the project—on his retirement. Dufresne opens the volume with a heartfelt dedication and an introduction. The first paper, by Alexandra Simonenko and Hirschbühler, exemplifies Hirschbühler’s characteristically detailed consideration of new data and careful attention to the previous literature. The authors analyze fifteen thousand examples of proclisis and enclisis of object pronouns in verb-initial clauses, examining four clause types over five centuries. They meticulously compare two previous analyses against the new data, concluding convincingly that Labelle and Hirschbühler’s 2005 account of functional-projection loss over time for some subtypes is superior to Rouveret’s 2004 analysis, in which the number of projections generally increases. The second paper (Dufresne and Fernande Dupuis) lays to rest the traditional assumption that the choice of auxiliary with verbs of motion and change-of-state in Old French was random. Rather, activities viewed as telic require BE in Old French, while atelic activities require HAVE. In this first large-scale investigation of unaccusativity in the history of French, over two thousand clauses (twelfth through sixteenth century) with verbs identified as syntactically unaccusative are examined. Although the preliminary character of some of the data on postverbal subjects (for example, incomplete labeling or discussion of some of the graphs) makes parts of the theoretical analysis difficult to evaluate, many fascinating questions for continuing research are raised. In the third of these admirably data-intensive studies, Christiane Marchello-Nizia and Magali Rouquier provide an extensive description of the order and expression of subjects and objects in two complete very early texts, the Passion de Clermont and the Vie de Saint Alexis. Adding these texts to two previously examined later texts, the authors obtain a more precise picture of the evolution of medieval French syntax. Object-verb order loses ground between the two early texts; there is a continual, intriguing preference for expressing either the subject or the object, but not both. (A question: Are verb-object versus object-verb orders for nonfinite verbs treated separately or not?) The final paper presents a follow-up by Lene Schøsler on her previous work with semantically bleached verbs such as faire or prendre and their nominal objects. She establishes tests for distinguishing such constructions, containing a fixed number and type of complements and modification relationships, from syntactically free verb phrases, maintaining that they represent a sub-type of grammaticalization . Overall, for those interested in French and Romance syntax and the lexicon, this volume will provoke new insights into the relevance of diachronic corpus studies to issues of more general concern. Indiana University, Bloomington Barbara Vance 228 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 ...

In faint praise of folly

This study critically examines the widespread practice of comparing the linguistic processes and representations of non-native speakers with those of natives. We argue that, in some respects, the method yields benefits, while in others it does not serve the interests of research into the nature of second language acquisition and bilingualism. We go on to consider certain analytical approaches that skirt the hazards of the method. The potential payoffs of native/non-native comparisons are illustrated in a priming study of monolingual and bilingual processing of ambiguity in complex French syntax (Gertken 2013).

Miroir historial: livre X

This text is the tenth book of a universal chronicle composed in 1388 and originally comprising twelve books, of which only the final three survive. Its author was abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vincent de Laon. Nineteenth-century editors such as Auguste Molinier, Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut, and Natalis de Wailly criticized what they saw as the work's lack of originality, but today, as Förnegård points out, the Miroir historial is better described as the product of a specific compilation technique, borrowing from both vernacular and Latin texts. Since many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century universal chronicles in French remain unedited, Förnegård's volume contributes to a broadening of the possibilities of research on compilations of this kind. His edition is remarkable for its extensive Introduction covering Jean de Noyal and his work, the manuscript, the manuscript tradition, the methods of compilation, and the principles behind the editing. The text's rare moments of originality, its thematic digressions, breaks in chronology, limited circulation, and indirect transmission of canonical texts such as Vincent de Beauvais make it typical of such chronicles. There was never more than one complete copy of the text; in addition, scholars in the Middle Ages copied out extracts. In the seventeenth century a significant part of the text was copied by André Duchesne and Étienne Baluze (Paris, BnF, Collection Baluze, 60, fols 272v–274v). The three extant books of Noyal's text are contained in Paris, BnF, f. fr. 10138. Förnegård helpfully attempts to reconstruct the text's manuscript tradition by examining references to the Miroir historial in post-medieval library catalogues and other works, and sets out various hypotheses about the version from which Duchesne and Baluze copied. He also comments extensively on Jean de Noyal's method of compilation, in a long chapter arranged according to the subject matter treated (for example, Franco-Flemish wars, local history), and includes some close textual analysis of parallel passages in the chronicle and its sources. The principle behind the editing is, as Förnegård explains in a relatively short chapter, largely traditionalist, which seems appropriate both to the nature of a historical chronicle and to the fact that it exists in only one manuscript; however, his division of long chapters into numbered paragraphs is a helpful editorial intervention. The critical apparatus includes useful comparisons with Jean de Noyal's sources where these help to illuminate the syntax. The editor's inclusion of a complete ‘Index verborum’ of all the words in the text in all their forms is intended to facilitate research on the lexicology, semantics, morphology, syntax, and style of Middle French. In addition, Förnegård includes an ‘Index nominum’, a bibliography, and an extensive table listing the direct and indirect sources of every section of the text. With its Introduction and critical apparatus, this edition will be invaluable to the scholar, but will also be of interest to the student and as a teaching aid for courses on the medieval chronicle.