Méthodes en grammaire française Edited by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Maurice Gross (review)

BOOK NOTICES 763 langue françoyse tant ancienne que moderne (1606), known as the Thresor, can be considered the forerunner of the monolingual French dictionary. It grew out of the four earlier editions of the Dictionnaire françoislatin , the first and second editions of which were prepared by Robert Estienne and the third and fourth by Jacques Dupuys. Wooldridge,firstofall,givesusanevaluation of the originality and richness ofthe Thresor— tracing the history ofthe different editions and their relationship, comparing each editor's intentions concerning his respective edition, and analysing the structure of the text itself from the point of view of the modern user. The original purpose of Estienne's Dictionnaire françois-latin (1539) was to help young scholars translate French into Latin. But times favored the development of vernacular languages, not Latin. In his second edition (1549), Estienne added only French words. In 1564, Dupuys addressed the third edition to the Duke of Bavaria, thus expanding the use of the dictionary to a foreign public. In the fourth edition (1 573), Dupuys gave French the same lexicographic importance that the classical languages already had. Under the direction of Nicot, the fifth edition changed its name and began to approximate a monolingual French dictionary. Nicot's Thresor is seen by W as 'the key to the development of French lexicography'. Judging from Furetière's Dictionnaire universel (1690), the Académie Française's Dictionnaire de l'Académie (1694), and more recent works by lexicographers such as Littré and Hatzfeld & Darmesteter—all of which were inspired by the Thresor—one can say that dictionary entries, so far as French lexicography is concerned, were invented by Nicot. Types of information included were orthography, pronunciation, grammatical function, semantic relationship, syntagmatic function, frequency or specialization of use, comparative etymology, and encyclopedic commentary. As we can see, 'almost all types of information and all techniques of description subsequently used in French dictionaries are already found in the pages of the Thresor' (P- ix)· From W's detailed study of the Thresor's entries, many lexical items previously hidden in the text come to light. In Chapter 2, W examines the 'accessibility' of entries in the Thresor. This accessibility is often compromised because of the Latin origin of the dictionary —in which the French was sometimes a translation from the Latin, was sometimes translated into Latin, and was sometimes explained in French. The user has to know the sources of the information he is about to read and the variant spellings of the items; in order to find an item he has to read through several columns of the dictionary. A triple system of classification was used, distinguished typographically : the items were grouped etymologically by family; one word of each family was isolated to constitute an entry; entries were presented alphabetically; and all the items of a family were the object of a micro-article. W's work, fortunately, does not suffer from the same lack of accessibility as the Thresor. It is clearly organized: all abbreviations and symbols are explained at the outset. It has a glossary of the linguistic terms used throughout the book, which makes it accessible to non-specialists; it also has an important bibliography on French lexicography, and three indices for authors and texts mentioned, words cited, and topics covered. Wooldridge's book is of commendable quality and is of interest to historians and scholars of French literature and language, as well as to lexicographers . [Daniel Celce-Murcia, Occidental College.] Méthodes en grammaire française. Edited by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Maurice Gross. Paris: Klincksieck, 1976. Pp. 226. This volume brings together the results of twelve recent studies in French syntax undertaken by a group of French transformationalists . It represents yet another welcome addition to the rapidly growing number of transformational works on French. The papers are grouped into three sections, preceded by a fairly informative introduction. The reader interested in learning how transformational approaches fare with respect to some problems in French syntax will find the first nine papers quite instructive; hence only these are summarized below. The remaining three are J. C. Chevalier, ' Exemples, théorie, tradition'; B. Cerquiglini et al., 'L'objet "ancien français...