MLRy 99.1, 2004 283 of the concept. Moreover he illustrates all his points with well-chosen and lucidly presented analyses from French, English, and ancient literature. Part I deals with four different kinds of irony in a historical perspective: Socratic irony, situational irony, verbal irony, and romantic irony. Part II deals more properly with the title of the work, the poetics of irony, asking how we can identify irony and suggesting that gesture, tone of voice, punctuation, repetition, juxtaposition, litotes, hyperbole, and paratexts can all contribute to signalling its presence. This second part also examines the three key roles in the game of irony (the ironist, the target, and the observer) and lays considerable stress on the observer's knowledge of the ironist and of the ironist's intentions in deciding whether or not to interpret a text ironically. This part ends with an analysis of the very fluid boundaries between irony and other literary modes or genres (comedy, satire, humour, sarcasm, cynicism, pastiche, and parody). Part III focuses on modernism and postmodernism. With modernism irony ceases to be an isolatable rhetorical device, and becomes a generalized vision of disjunction which a host of other devices can be pressed into expressing. Whereas modernism seeks to unite the elements of disjunction, postmodernism rejoices in their disjointedness , and appropriately enough the textual voice becomes multiple as the author now reproduces hitherto unpublished texts by Linda Hutcheon, Candace Long, and Joseph Dane, exemplifying respectively their political, deconstructionist, and selfreflexive approaches to irony,made available here to French readers forthe firsttime. Schoentjes deals with complex issues and does so with great clarity and yet without simplification. This is a solidly constructed and thoroughly useful mise au point. Keble College, Oxford Michael Hawcroft La Psychomecanique aujourd'hui: Actes du 8e colloque international de psychomecanique du langage, Seyssel, 1997. Ed. By P. de Carvalho, M. Quayle, L. Rosier, and O. Soutet. Paris: Champion. 2001. 382 pp. FF 400.ISBN 2-7453-0379-1. These proceedings of the 8th International Colloquium of Psychomechanics reflect the current state of research into Guillaumean linguistics carried by both experienced scholars and young researchers. Most ofthe papers collated here, following in Gustave Guillaume's footsteps, focus on phenomena of grammatical semantics. His positions are commented upon (e.g. for the definition of a word as an 'unite de puissance' in Francis Tollin's contribution), compared with others (e.g. those of de Saussure and of textual linguistics by Ivan Evrard), and applied to non-Indo-European languages such as Arabie in the final paper by Georges Dorlian. In his introduction to the collection oftexts, Olivier Soutet reminds the reader ofthe Guillaumean dichotomy between 'linguistique de discours', the sole purpose ofwhich is informative, and 'linguistique de langue'. The latter is preferred and presented as a linguistics relying on words. Words, whether they are seen as preliminary to sentences and therefore to discourse formation or as the result ofa morphogenesis, are the focus of Tollin, who devotes his paper to circumscribing the concept of word, the definition of which shows variation within Guillaume's writings. The following thirteen papers study morphemes as word-morphemes, bound morphemes , or grammatical morphemes. Within the firstgroup, Didier Bottineau and Jacques Coulardeau look at the English morpheme 'to', the former to offersuggestions about the position and the function of this particle in the English verbal system, the latter to discuss its differentsemantic values. As forDanielle Leeman, she is inter? ested in the constitution ofthe signified of 'dans'. Sonia Michiels attempts to define the semantic value of 'bien', which can be an affirmative adverb, as well as show? ing the interaction of its semantico-syntactic values with assertion and interrogation. 284 Reviews Nigel Quayle closes this firstsection with a discussion of 'get' as a possible auxiliary verb. Under the heading of bound morphemes, papers by Teddy Arnavielle and by Patrick Duffley discuss on the one hand the '-ant' form in French and on the other hand the '-ing' form in English. Next comes a discussion ofthe 'signifie de puissance' of the Polish locative by Barbara Bacz. Finally, Joseph Pattee presents methodology problems linked with the value ofthe German suffix'-lich' in iangue'. The following contributions return to two...