A History of the French Language through Texts by Wendy Ayres-Bennett (review)

78Rocky Mountain Review applying overly simplistic criteria to literature. To remedy the current plight of Germanistik, Arntzen calls for "Interpretation von der Sprache her" (122), a sound, oeuvre-based methodology, which he illustrates — skillfully , step by step — with the help of given texts (by Goethe and Kafka). Recent proclamations asserting the end of interpretation (Enzensberger, Sontag) are shown to be hollow. Arntzen's engrossing, closely argued treatise should be required reading for every serious Germanist. RUDOLF KOESTER University ofNevada, Las Vegas WENDY AYRES-BENNETT. A History of the French Language through Texts. London: Routledge, 1996. 303 p. Anyone interested in the study of the French language will welcome this new socio-linguistic history, whose originality lies in focusing on a wide range of texts in French rather than on abstract principles. This by no means implies that Wendy Ayres-Bennett's study lacks in critical or cognitive sophistication. On the contrary, her complex and thorough discussion of each text examined here delightfully combines accurate and pertinent linguistic concepts with specific information on the historical and regional context surrounding each text. First, the concise yet substantial introduction not only challenges the criteria on which previous histories of the French language were based, but also justifies the use of different kinds of texts as a basis for linguistic study. The raison d'être of this book lies in the following: the focus on texts represents a less passive approach to the discovery of how the French language evolved; the texts, chosen among the earliest extant examples from the ninth century up to the late twentieth century, provide an extensive corpus through which to trace the evolution of French; the synchronic and diachronic approaches avoid pitfalls such as viewing Old French "as merely a stepping stone in the history from Vulgar Latin to Modern French" (2), or viewing the French language as a monolithic structure which ignores or marginalizes variation. The advent of socio-historical linguistics in the early 1980s brought about the innovative principle according to which "there is no reason to assume that language did not vary in the same patterned way in the past as has been observed today" (3). Another point of contention expressed by the author concerns the standardization and codification of French within the norms of le bon usage, privileging literary texts. Therefore other types of discourse have been inserted here, such as legal, scientific, medical, or journalistic pieces. As Ayres-Bennett analyzes various histories of the French language, she gives ample and specific references to texts by linguists of all backgrounds and nationalities to document the evolution of this research. Before starting the chronological study of texts, she provides a brief summary of the history Book Reviews79 of French, which helps readers understand her division into six broad periods: 1. the language of the earliest texts from the middle of the ninth century to the end of the eleventh century; 2. the "heyday" of Old French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; 3. Middle French in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; 4. Renaissance French in the sixteenth century; 5. Classical and Neo-Classical French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 6. Modern French from the Revolution to the present day. For each period considered a concise introduction is provided to characterize its main features, and each text selected therein is presented to stress its specificity. This strategy, allied with detailed linguistic commentaries encompassing phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics , succeeds in allowing the variations between the different texts of the same linguistic period to emerge and to confirm the author's conviction that the structure of French has never been monolithic. Because regional and cultural comments are also provided for each text, their literary interpretation becomes strengthened, just as the linguistic aspect becomes more thorough by taking into account the social and historical context in which French existed in its various facets. The selection of texts is generally shrewd, in its inclusion of not only pieces from France, but also from Francophone countries such as Haiti for eighteenth-century Haitian Creole to be compared and mostly contrasted with the aristocratic Parisian French of the same linguistic period, and Quebec for twentieth-century Acadian which reveals...