A Comprehensive French Grammar (review)

The fourth edition of this grammar appeared in 1993 under the title L. S. R. Byrne and E. L. Churchill’s a comprehensive French grammar (Oxford: Blackwell). As Price explains in the preface to this new edition, scarcely any of the material in the original grammar by Byrne and Churchill now remains in this volume so it is no longer necessary to retain their names in the title. P further points out that ‘[i]n this fifth edition, a number of modifications to points of detail have been introduced . . . . However, the paragraph numbering and the pagination of the fourth edition have been retained’ (xii). Indeed, the most prominent modification appears to be the pervasive substitution of euros for francs in the language samples (cf. Je vais emprunter mille euros [formerly: francs] à mon frère ‘I am going to borrow a thousand euros from my brother’ [394; though P has not undertaken an actual currency conversion]).

A comprehensive French grammar is user-friendly. The introduction (1–13) contains sections on the alphabet, phonetic transcriptions, the two varieties of h in French, capitalization, punctuation, syllabification, hyphenation, diacritics, and elision. This is followed by chapters on ‘The noun phrase’ (14–244), ‘Verbs’ (245–428), ‘The structure of the sentence’ (429–72), and ‘Adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions’ (473–544). An appendix (545–54) delineates the ‘expression of age, time, price, dimensions, speed, [and] fuel consumption’ (x). The 30-page index (555–84) is particularly useful.

Nevertheless, in preparing this fifth edition, P has not availed himself of the opportunity to fill in a number of arguably minor, but potentially significant, lacunae of previous editions. For example, the section on the infinitive (327–37) still makes no mention of the infinitif de narration; introduced by the preposition de, this verbal construction denotes the sudden onset of an action in the past, for example, Et les enfants de sauter et de crier ‘And the children began jumping and yelling’, Et l’ivrogne de se diriger vers la porte et de sortir ‘And the drunk headed toward the door and walked out’ (examples from Le Petit Robert French dictionary, Paris: Le Robert, 1981, p. 448). In the section on tenses (310–26), the imperfect as past conditional also continues to be disregarded (for example, tombais ‘fell’ in Un pas de plus et je tombais à l’eau ‘One more step and I would have fallen in the water’).

In the section on modal auxiliaries (‘May, might, must, ought, should, would’, 383–87), P states that ‘where English uses “must” and the past infinitive, French usually has a compound tense of devoir and the present infinitive’ (385). This is correct; however, P forgoes any example of the competing construction, viz., a simple tense of devoir and the past infinitive. Here something along the lines of Il a dû se tromper ~ Il doit s’être trompé ‘He must have been mistaken’ might have been in order (only the former being conceivably ambiguous with respect to deontic [‘He had to deceive himself’] vs. epistemic modality).

While the omissions indicated here do not seriously detract from the overall utility of P’s work, any grammar labeled ‘comprehensive’ is necessarily subject to particular scrutiny.