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  • Introduction à l’histoire de la langue françaiseby Michèle Perret
  • T. M. Rainsford
Introduction à l’histoire de la langue française. Par M ichèleP erret. 4 eédn. ( Cursus, linguistique.) Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. 240 pp., ill.

Among a number of recent single-volume introductions to the history of French, Michèle Perret’s is marked out by its three-part thematic structure, dealing first with the external history of the language, then the internal history, and finally giving a series of textual commentaries. As a result, the treatment of many structural changes is commendably clear: the five chapters in Part Two — dealing with sound change, ‘linguistic [End Page 577]innovation’, lexis, the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and orthography respectively — give a far better overview of the development of linguistic structure from Latin to French than is found in most chronologically organized works. Refreshing, too, is the author’s presentation of the history of French within the development of linguistic theory: for example, sound laws are not simply stated as fact, but are introduced with reference both to the neogrammarians and to sociolinguistic approaches to sound change. The examples given throughout the text are original and engagingly discussed, and the inclusion for commentary of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, which contain many non-standard features, marks a departure from the many histories of French that focus only on the development of the standard language. However, while the book works well as an introduction to the history of French for a non-specialist, it should be used with caution by students ‘aux cycles L et M de science du langage et des lettres’ (back cover). Several chapters draw heavily on outdated or controversial sources (for example, the discussion in Chapter 8 of ‘l’innovation linguistique’ is based on Henri Frei’s Grammaire des fautes(Paris: Geuthner, 1929)), while more modern linguistic approaches are presented too briefly and over-simplistically. This is particularly noticeable in the section on grammaticalization, new since the 1998 edition, which claims that the term refers to ‘tout changement de catégorie, de sémantisme et de fonction affectant un élément de la langue’ (p. 226). In part, this may be a consequence of successive, isolated revisions to the text over its four editions, which seek to mention recent theories in passing without substantially changing the overall structure of the work. As a further example, Anthony Lodge’s coherent argument in favour of a Parisian spoken koine as the origin of standard French is mentioned, dismissed in a sentence, and largely forgotten (pp. 66–67), with the author instead adopting the view that even the earliest Old French texts show a partly standardized scripta transdialectale. This view also colours the text commentaries: for example, it is disappointing to see it asserted without qualification that the letter iin savirand podirfrom the Strasbourg Oathsrepresents the diphthong/ei/ (p. 170). Finally, the ‘documents’ section (timeline, list of sound changes, list of language families) at the end of the book is blighted by frequent typographical errors, the most glaring of which results in Latin being listed as a Hellenic language (p. 209). Despite identical content, no such errors are present in this section of the second edition.

T. M. Rainsford
Institut für Linguistik/Romanistik, Universitat Stuttgart

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