Reviewed by: L'interrogative en français éd. by Marie-José Béguelin, Aidan Coveney, et Alexander Guryev Elizabeth Zwanziger Béguelin, Marie-José, Aidan Coveney, et Alexander Guryev, éd. L'interrogative en français. Peter Lang, 2018. ISBN 978-3-0343-3289-7. Pp. 317. The last several decades have brought numerous studies on the form and usage of French interrogatives. It is a topic ripe for inquiry due to the diverse syntactic, morpho-syntactic, semantic, sociolinguistic, and prosodic factors that contribute to speakers' selection of one variant over another. The twelve authors of this collection of eleven studies use corpus data from literature, cinema, text messaging, and comic strips, among others, to study the palette of French interrogative structures from syntactic, semantic, sociolinguistic, discursive, and narratological points of view. In the first study, R. Druetta discusses the dichotomy between written and oral question forms, proposing that a speaker's choice of variant involves the juggling of prescriptive norms and the situational context. The role of rising intonation in questions is the focus of E. Delais-Roussarie and S. Herment's study, which shows significant variability both between and within speakers. Their analysis proposes that sentence final contour is not [End Page 232] the only way to recognize an interrogative utterance and that there are many factors at work in a speaker's prosodic choices for questions. A. Berrendonner addresses subject-clitic inversion, demonstrating that it is not necessarily first and foremost a question marker, but serves multiple other functions. G. Zumwald Küster analyzes est-ce que, its flipped order, and short and long variations. Differences in use are proposed to be largely socio-demographic in nature. Phonological context is shown to be a secondary factor in the selection of a variant. L. Dekhissi and A. Coveney examine WH-questions in a contemporary film corpus set in ethnically diverse parts of Paris. Findings include the use of qu'est-ce que in place of pourquoi in rhetorical questions with conflictual context, the alternation of the QSV (question-subject-verb) and SVQ (subject-verb-question) variants, and an apparent increase in the use of SVQ. A Swiss text message corpus is examined in A. Guryev's study. Findings show that there are morphosyntactic environments that have low variability and favor the SV question form, the most common variant in the corpus, and that other linguistic and extra-linguistic environments have greater variability as to structure selected. In her study, F. Lefeuvre presents questions with ça/cela as the most common interrogative type not containing a verb due to its strong referentiality. G. Corminboeuf discusses pseudointerrogatives, demonstrating that not all structures that are questions from a syntactic point of view possess the semantic value of a question. C. Rossari compares the semantic properties of the French conditional mood and Italian future tense in interrogatives. Using examples from La Fontaine's Fables, M. Bonhomme analyzes the syntactic and pragmatic complexity of rhetorical questions. Finally, M. Borel examines the unique functions of interrogatives in comic strip series, which serve to trigger curiosity and desire to continue to the next episode. This volume provides a robust synthesis of variation in French interrogatives including examples from historical to contemporary genres with most research citations dating from the last two decades. Authors make mention of untapped aspects of the study of French interrogative variation, inviting further exploration into this vast domain. Elizabeth Zwanziger University of Northern Iowa Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French