Remarques et observations sur la langue française: histoire etévolution d’un genre (review)

The French language begins to receive formal attention from native speakers in the sixteenth century when the first grammars appear, but it is only in the seventeenth that systematic work on its codification gets underway. An important contribution to this process was made by the remarqueurs, cultivated individuals who addressed cases of linguistic variation found in the upper stratum of French society of their time. These they sought to resolve through the recommendation of one variant at the expense of others, typically taking as a basis what was deemed to be the usage of the ‘best’ speakers. Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Magali Seijido offer a lucid and richly documented picture of this new linguistic tradition, which they make a solid case for viewing as a distinct genre. In the opening chapter, details of the corpus used are presented. In all, thirteen works of remarques dating from between 1647 and 1698 are analysed, together with four compilations raisonnées, or critical compilations of observations that had been published on specific points of usage. (All the texts are available on the Classiques Garnier digital database.) Occupying central stage is Claude Favre de Vaugelas’s 1647 work Remarques sur la langue françoise, which launched the new genre. This was a randomly ordered collection of 549 brief observations on uncertainties in contemporary usage largely but not entirely prescriptive in approach. Vaugelas’s model of description was broadly maintained by subsequent remarqueurs, although his practice of randomly ordering remarques was not followed. But his essentially synchronic, prescriptive approach was maintained; indeed, as is noted, it becomes more prescriptive and even puristic in the compilations especially. The popularizing style of presentation was also retained, since all the remarqueurs wished their works to be readily intelligible to the intended readership: honnêtes gens who wanted to avoid pedantry and who were not necessarily familiar with Latin or grammatical theory, and also new members of the nobility, upwardly aspiring people who saw such works as livres d’étiquette. However, as the authors emphasize, the remarqueurs did not form a homogeneous group. Rather, they showed differences in their range of coverage, approach, and judgements. The divergences are borne out in a lengthy chapter presenting the differing views of the remarqueurs on individual uncertainties of pronunciation and spelling, morphology, syntax, lexis, and style. Here, in addition to reviewing the remarques concerned, the authors try to identify the changing preoccupations and aims of the different remarqueurs, thereby providing a fuller picture of a genre that is shown to be in continuous evolution. Attention then turns to the metalinguistic and literary sources cited by the remarqueurs, where, notably, it emerges that more theoretical studies — for example by Charles Maupas or Claude Irson — are seldom mentioned. A final chapter considers post-seventeenth-century developments in a genre whose spirit is seen to survive even into modern times in newspaper chroniques de langage. Four appendices, a substantial bibliography, and two indexes complete this fine study of an important sociolinguistic genre in the history of French.