Études sur le changement linguistique en français (review)

The absence of an introductory chapter in this collection of nineteen papers from the Diachro 2 conference held in Paris in 2004 is perhaps a reflection of the difficulty of drawing out themes and trends from an apparently disparate set of studies. There are themes to be found, however, and it is regrettable that the editors have chosen to present the papers in alphabetical order, which rather obscures the potentially interesting connections between some of them. The papers stretch from Latin to twenty-first century French, with a broad range of levels of analysis including phonetics and phonology (h-aspiré, consonant clusters, prosody), morphosyntax (ne, determiners) and discourse-pragmatics (pronouns of address), though the biggest single group focuses on specific items such as ains, depuis, madame. The majority draw on corpora (most commonly the Base de Français Médiéval and FRANTEXT); most are qualitative but there are several quantitative studies, though the methodology and presentation of data in some of these is questionable. Many papers are descriptive in focus but a few address issues of theoretical interest. Unsurprisingly in a volume on change, the most common theoretical theme is grammaticalisation; many papers simply use the concept as a framework for essentially descriptive studies, but others, for example Carlier and De Mulder, grapple with theoretical questions such as the directionality of grammaticalisation and its relation to different types of meaning. Rather than using historical data to address theories of linguistic change, Ségéral and Scheer examine patterns of change involving consonant clusters from early Gallo-Romance to argue against the universal constraints on core syllabification which are widely accepted by contemporary theoretical phonologists. The other interesting group of papers presents new data to challenge both the received wisdom on the historical trajectories of certain changes and assumptions made on the basis of twentieth-century variationist sociolinguistic studies. Thus, Blondeau questions the assumption based on 'apparent time' studies of nous~ on that there has been a steady decrease in nous usage since its decline began in the nineteenth century. Brousseau reverses more common strategies of investigation, examining creoles for evidence of the presence of a phonetic h-aspiré in early modern French. Dufter and Stark not only challenge the received wisdom on the timing of the rise of ne-deletion, but also use contemporary language acquisition data from the CHILDES corpus to refute the claim that characteristics of the speech of the infant Louis XIII, as recorded by Héroard, can be dismissed as arising from linguistic immaturity. Bertin examines a range of features to make the important point that comparison between manuscripts of the same text must take account of the geographical as well as the chronological distance between them and, crucially, of the polylectal competence of mediaeval scribes. As a rather unpolished assembly of conference papers, this volume is not entirely satisfactory, but its rough edges should not be allowed to mask the interest of much of the content, not least in sketching blueprints for future, more in-depth studies of the phenomena and issues raised.