Claire Blanche-Benveniste: la linguistique à l’école de l’oral Édité par Ruggero Druetta (review)

Ruggero Druetta’s edited volume is not the first to be published in memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste. In contrast to Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste edited by Sandrine Caddéo and others (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2012; see French Studies, 67 (2013), 451–52), Druetta’s collection takes her pioneering work on spoken French as a starting point. It is, in his words, ‘un travail qui n’a pas seulement permis d’accroître la connaissance du français parlé, mais de penser autrement la langue dans une société lettrée qui s’identifie à des modèles littéraires ou à des écrits formels’ (p. 11). The volume’s aim, therefore, is not just to examine her work on the oral code but also to explore its significance at the broadest possible level. Druetta’s opening ‘Présentation’ is followed by a series of papers organized into three chapitres: ‘I: De l’oral à l’écrit’, ‘II: (Ré)ajustements théoriques’, ‘ III: Ouvertures’. Some of the essays are versions of papers given at a conference in Turin in May 2011; others are later additions. The contributors include close colleagues and former students such as Sandrine Caddéo, Marie-José Béguelin, Frédéric Sabio, and Marie-Noëlle Roubaud. Several of the papers will undoubtedly contribute to a better understanding of Blanche-Benveniste’s linguistic thought. For example, Béguelin provides an excellent account of the place of written language in her work: Blanche-Benveniste rejected the ‘two-language’ hypothesis for French (with the exception, perhaps, of morphology), insisting instead on the autonomy of the two codes, which means, crucially, that they can influence each other. In his own illuminating essay, on Blanche-Benveniste’s epistemology, Druetta takes a comparative approach, which allows him to reveal how her linguistic thought relates to fields such as generative syntax and sociolinguistics. The volume also provides the opportunity for considering Blanche-Benveniste’s œuvre from different perspectives: Doina Spiţă, for example, highlights her less well-known work on intercomprehension, and Roubaud explores the significance of her work for education from the unique viewpoint of a series of thirteen unpublished manuscripts. A group of papers contributes to our understanding of individual phenomena, in particular at the level of syntax. For instance, Elisabetta Bonvino offers a new analysis of post-verbal subjects in Italian using the grille d’analyse, and Sabio highlights the weakness of traditional grammar that fails to account for the fact that certain complements traditionally considered optional are not in fact so. Although this collection will certainly be useful to those interested in Blanche-Benveniste’s contribution to French linguistics, the contributors repeatedly demonstrate throughout the volume that she was not just a specialist in spoken French; indeed, some of the main ‘lessons’ they discuss are relevant at the most general level. Perhaps the most useful contributions are, on the one hand, those that examine Blanche-Benveniste’s work as a whole, and, on the other, those that test fresh ground by applying her methods to new questions and new languages.