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 ...