Reviewed by: Des Organisations Dynamiques De L'oral ed. by Élisabeth Richard Betsy Kerr Richard, Élisabeth, éd. Des organisations dynamiques de l'oral. Peter Lang, 2018. ISBN 978-3-0343-3136-4. Pp. 418. Though not presented as such, this volume is a collection of nineteen articles, typically fifteen pages in length, based on a conference held at Université Rennes 2 in 2011 on the theme "(Dés)-organisation de l'oral?" Its goal is to offer a review of current work on oral French, focusing on the general theme of organizational strategies manifest in what has traditionally been considered disorganized spontaneous speech. Compared to typical conference proceedings, this volume is well written and edited (despite a rather high number of proofreading errors) and shares in both the positive and negative aspects of such volumes. On the positive side, it offers a broad spectrum of somewhat diverse approaches to various aspects of the subject. On the negative, the short length of the papers is somewhat constraining, and some of the topics do not lend themselves to this format, e.g., Shirota's exposition of the prosody of certain Japanese discourse markers, which naturally requires a good deal of preliminary description of Japanese. All contributions are based on corpus data, thus demonstrating the extraordinary recent progress in the creation of diverse corpora of spoken French, several of which are now available online. While all papers are written in French and the majority treat Metropolitan French, a small subset deal with other language varieties: one on Japanese, one on Turkish, one on Modern Hebrew, two on [End Page 187] English, and one on Quebec French. The volume is organized in four parts, of which the first deals with issues of prosody, while the other three treat various means of structuring discourse, with the final section devoted to studies of various discourse markers. With very few exceptions, the authors are academics working in France, Belgium, or Switzerland, and their work takes its inspiration largely from French sources, notably Morel and Danon-Boileau's work on suprasegmentals and Blanche-Benveniste's development of macro-syntax. For this reviewer, the following stand out as exemplary contributions: Hanote and Chuquet's chapter on the marking of reported speech in English; Tanguy's study of certain verbless utterances preceding another utterance (un camion qui a basculé et il est tombé); Skrovec's exposition of three types of manipulations or repetitions employed to increase the coherence of complex utterances; Martinot's description of the various configurations of reformulations used in the construction of oral autobiographical narratives; Oloff's study distinguishing two distinct types of validation of a collaborative utterance completion by another speaker; Dostie's elucidation of the values of the discourse marker là and especially of its similar but distinct reduplicated form là là in Quebec French. The papers are supplemented by the two keynote presentations of the conference: Morel's admittedly subjective history of research on oral French, and Cappeau's brief conclusion on some of the hot issues in the field, e.g., whether written and spoken French constitute two distinct languages. This volume will certainly interest any scholar working on spoken French, and the best chapters could be of use in a graduate seminar in French linguistics. Betsy Kerr University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French