A Reference Grammar of French (review)

Those who enjoy dipping into grammar books will find many hours of enjoyment here. Though a reference grammar at heart, its short, focused chapters are presented with few subheadings, so that the reader is drawn in to the chapter topic as a whole, even once an answer has been located. This, along with the lively style and wealth of intriguing facts, is a great strength of the book. A few quirks in the structure and index do not detract from its overall qualities. The content is presented in sixty-eight chapters, grouped into eleven parts. The motivation for the division into (untitled) parts is not particularly clear, as the parts are neither uniform in size, nor are the chapters always grouped by obvious grammatical connections (for example, the subjunctive mood forms a twenty-page chapter and part by itself, while the imperative mood forms one of thirty-three chapters in a 225-page part devoted to verbs). The content as a whole is very well located within its wider context, however. In their broad-sweep introductory essay on the history of French, the authors give a clear sense of the diversity of Francophonie today, as well as the deep-rooted tensions between prescription and description. Examples throughout the book are drawn principally from France, Quebec, Belgium, and Switzerland, and also illustrate a range of registers (discussed in early chapters), with classification as R1 (very informal), R2 (standard), or R3 (formal, literary) to aid the learner. Further, a very attractive feature is that the authors consistently seek to place French in the context of neighbouring Romance languages, with discussion of systematic grammatical differences between French, Italian, and Spanish. Several of the illustrative texts that introduce most chapters also take the geography or culture of other countries as their subject matter. This contextualization will be very useful for students learning more than one of these languages, and, like the book as a whole, offers food for thought for others. All treatment of pronunciation is achieved without recourse to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which makes it very accessible, but means that advanced students may wish to use the book in conjunction with a good dictionary indicating pronunciation. The grammar ends with a helpful glossary, with entry headings that are bilingual like the chapter headings, a brief, partially annotated bibliography of grammars and usage guides, and two indexes — a general index and a 'subjunctive index'. With the main index, the user has to be prepared to try different entries (for example, to locate treatment of the definite article under 'le/la/les' rather than 'definite article' or 'articles'), or to cross-reference to the contents page. One might argue that the subjunctive index is hardly necessary, as all of the entries refer to a single twenty-page chapter on the subjunctive mood; nevertheless, this is an ingenious idea, and should be a frequent port of call by anglophone students who often fear the subjunctive's unknowns. All in all, this is the sort of grammar book with which one can form a lasting relationship throughout a degree programme.