Reviews 281 However, its very breadth is also a challenge. Whereas virtually all the chapters are devoted to linguistic change in French, three of the twenty-nine are devoted to different, unrelated languages (Henri for Sungwadia, Pivot for Chibcha, Barjric for Serbo-Croatian, and Haselow for English), the latter being the only contribution written in that language. Moreover, the organization of the volume seems artificial, in that fourteen chapters are in part 3.Yet all in all, this volume is a welcome contribution to the study of language change. University of Nevada, Las Vegas Deborah Arteaga Carlier,Anne, Michèle Goyens, et Béatrice Lamiroy, éd. Le français en diachronie: nouveaux objets et méthodes. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-16606 . Pp. vii + 460. This volume of seventeen papers from the 2012 Diachro conference in Leuven, including pieces from invited speakers Buridant and Lodge, presents some of the latest research in the history of the French language. The first section (seven articles) highlights how translation—mainly Classical, Late and Neo-Latin texts into Old and Middle French—can be a tool to better understand linguistic change, language interference (both conscious and subconscious), and diglossia. The next four articles examine more recent changes (eighteenth to nineteenth century) in French, while the final section pulls together pieces on a variety of topics, such as grammaticalization, coordination, the passé simple, and word order. The selection of articles seems aimed at cutting-edge research stemming from a variety of frameworks, but all involve extensive examination of corpora, including online sources such as the Anglo-Norman Online Hub, Base de Français Médiéval, and Frantext. While clearly aimed at the specialist familiar with Latin and Old and Middle French, many articles contain enough translations and/or glosses to make them approachable to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. A few contributions stand out as possible ancillary readings for History of the Language courses. Schøsler’s article compares thirteenth-century French translations of Cicero’s works alongside a sixteenth-century self-translation of Calvin. Examining the use of discontinuous subjects (common in Latin), verbs of movement, and support verb constructions, she shows how the translator is influenced by, or consciously avoids, constructions from the source language. Ducos questions whether Latin was the only source of neologisms in the early stages of French. Scrutinizing twelfth- and thirteenth-century astronomical texts (which are not glossed) and other scientific works, she shows that neologisms were based not only on Latin, but that French equivalents or variants existed for many scientific terms well before Oresme’s fourteenth-century Latin-based neologisms. Lodge takes a sociolinguistic approach to phonetic, morphological, and syntactic variation in eighteenthto nineteenth-century French, examining texts in the Parisian poissard dialect. He illustrates how postindustrial demographic growth helped level this urban vernacular and argues that linguists should take a multidimensional, holistic approach to language change. Klein reconsiders Mercier’s (1801) controversial lexicographical work and gives the reader a newly found appreciation for Mercier’s innovative approach to neologisms in a well-documented appendix. Tourrette explores the history of the spelling conundrum for adjectives in [il]—differentiated civil/civile, vil/vile versus epicene facile, utile. He examines the undermarking and overmarking of gender agreement from the sixteenth century to present, cleverly concluding:“Si nos étudiants commettent des erreurs, c’est finalement parce qu’ils sont trop grammairiens et qu’ils appliquent trop les règles”(308). Finally, in an extremely well-glossed article, Guillot and Carlier present both the morphological and semantic details of how the Latin ternary system of demonstratives evolved into the French binary system, with special emphasis on Late Latin. Overall, this carefully edited work, with many easy-to-follow tables, charts, and graphics, presents the latest, corpus-based research in the evolution of the French language and will be a great resource for historical linguists. Florida International University Peter A. Machonis Guijarro-Fuentes, Pedro, Katrin Schmitz, and Natascha Müller, eds. The Acquisition of French in Multilingual Contexts. Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2016. ISBN 978-1-78309-452-3. Pp. 268. Against a generative theoretical backdrop, eight studies take up the acquisition of French as a second first...
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Oct 24, 2024
Victoria Beatrix Fendel 
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