Research on Old French: The State of the Art Edited by Deborah L. Arteaga (review)

This volume uniting seventeen linguistic studies of Old French provides an overview of ‘the discipline as it is practiced today, in all of its forms’ (p. 2) and is successful in its aim to be generally accessible to linguistics scholars. Contributors take care to provide a clear survey of the theoretical frameworks adopted, papers are in English, and all examples are glossed. The range of topics is varied, although phonology and morphosyntax predominate, notably the case system (Lene Schøsler; Deborah Arteaga and Julia Herschensohn), verb-second word order (Richard Ingham; Eric Mathieu), the use of verb paradigms (Jan Lindschouw; Igor Dreer; Margaret E. Winters), and the formal analysis of sound change (Randall Gess; Haike Jacobs and Janine Berns). While Cyril Aslanov provides an excellent study of the formation and characteristics of the Crusaders’ Old French koiné, variationist linguistics is not otherwise represented, despite much excellent recent research (such as that by R. Anthony Lodge on koinézation in continental Old French itself). Happily, variation within the textual record due to dialect, form, genre, discourse type, etc. is central to many contributors’ analyses (in particular, Lindschouw; Schøsler; Harald Volker; Julie Glikman and Thomas Verjans; Ingham; Sophie Marnette). A further strength of many contributions is the successful combination of original, often corpus-based empirical work and modern linguistic theory. This state-of-the-art methodology is particularly noticeable in Lindschouw’s study of the development of the subjunctive as a ‘regrammation’ (in Henning Andersen’s sense) of the paradigm, in Volker’s analysis of semantic change based on a ‘multi-level’ structuralist model of the linguistic sign, and in Ingham’s Minimalist analysis of negative clauses introduced by ja and onques. Contributions with less robust empirical work suffer as a result. Arteaga and Herschensohn’s analysis of the genitive uses examples drawn from secondary sources only; since the authors account for the word-order variation in la chambre son père (postposed possessor) and la deu merci (preposed possessor) by the presence or absence of a determiner before the possessor (p. 36), it is regrettable that they omit to mention frequent examples in which the possessor Dieu is postposed despite its lack of determiner (for example, la grace Dieu, la merci Dieu, la part Dieu). Unfortunately, the volume is marred by very poor copy-editing, and typographical errors are irritatingly frequent: in one case, a reviewer’s comment ‘minuscules?’ is even printed in the section headings (pp. 193, 195, 198). Some linguistic analyses are printed incorrectly: for example, on p. 274 the position of ne + poriez in the syntactic tree in Example 25 is not shown. In Dreer’s paper, the final word of every cited title is conspicuously absent (for example, Les Serments de [sic], p. 222). The style and typesetting of linguistic examples varies substantially between chapters, and one paper uses endnotes rather than footnotes. The reader is left with the disconcerting impression that he or she might be the first person to have read the typescript from beginning to end. Despite these shortcomings, the volume succeeds overall in presenting a dynamic and diverse picture of current research in the field.