In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste ed. by Sandrine Caddéo et al.
  • Mairi McLaughlin
Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Sous la direction de Sandrine Caddéo, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Magali Rouquier et Frédéric Sabio. (Langues et langage, 20). Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2012. 254254 pp., ill.

This volume presents twenty papers given during a three-day event held in Paris in 2010 in memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste (1935-2010). The papers are organized into seven sections, the first of which treats Blanche-Benveniste's linguistic thought in general. The section begins with an extremely clear summary, written by the four co-editors (all former students), of her most important contributions, and includes a more linguistically detailed account of her work on syntax by Dominique Willems. Each of the other six sections covers an individual research field influenced by Blanche-Benveniste: 'Écriture et morphologie', 'Syntaxe', 'Prosodie', 'Genres discursifs', 'Français parlé et langue seconde', and 'Études sur d'autres langues'. The breadth of topics is testament to the range and number of fields that Blanche-Benveniste touched, and the nature of her influence prevents the collection from feeling disjointed. Her own interests, methods, and attitudes reappear time and again in many of the individual [End Page 451] papers. Blanche-Benveniste is best known for her pioneering research on spoken French —Marie-José Béguelin, in her study of orthographic variation in text messages, calls her 'la grande dame des études du français parlé' (p. 47). Sylvain Kahane demonstrates very clearly the value of the analyse en grille developed in Aix towards the end of the 1970s: more than just a descriptive tool, it offers new theoretical possibilities because of the place it accords to the paradigmatic level alongside the syntagmatic. We see a continuation of Blanche-Benveniste's work on spoken French in some of the most valuable contributions to the collection, such as Janice Carruthers's investigation of the difference between histoire and témoignage in the CORPAIX corpus of spoken French, and Inge Bartning, Fanny Forsberg Lundell, and Victorine Hancock's very rich comparison of native speakers and near-native speakers that focuses on information structure, their use of 'prefabricated sequences', and the appearance of morphosyntactic errors. The reader is also reminded that Blanche-Benveniste's work had a significant impact on other fields. Mats Forsgren, for example, explains that the research programmme Le Français parlé des médias is an extension of her commitment to describing the features of spoken French in all of its different genres. Hanne Leth Andersen also attributes to her influence the development of a very innovative pedagogical framework in Denmark that better accounts for spoken language by focusing on the discursive level as well as the more traditional morphological and syntactic levels. Other highlights include Alain Berrendonner's exploration of the notion of governement, David Gaatone's description of Blanche-Benveniste's work on French verbal conjugation, and Françoise Gadet's reflection on what she calls 'une rencontre inachevée' between 'la sociolinguistique de la langue et la syntaxe du français parlé' (p. 35). I did not know Claire particularly well, but I think that she would have appreciated the fact that this volume does not just look back at her work but also presents the most recent research and looks to the future of the many subfields on which it touches. This combination also makes it a most useful publication for students and established scholars alike. [End Page 452]

Mairi McLaughlin
University of California, Berkeley
...

pdf

Share