L’Émergence des constructions clivées, pseudo-clivées et liées en français by Magali Rouquier (review)

This monograph incorporates Magali Rouquier’s previous work on cleft sentences in Old and Middle French and extends the scope of her research to include pseudo-clefts, along with what are called phrases liées. This structure, which the author notes does not have a specific name in the grammars that she has consulted, can be schematized as ‘c’est A que B’ as in her example ‘c’est une belle fleur que la rose’ (p. 137). The self-described aim of the work ‘est de présenter la description, l’analyse et l’établissement de la diachronie de [ces trois] constructions’ (p. 7), and in this undertaking, the author is successful. As a whole, the work benefits from an extremely rich array of examples representing each of the three constructions and their subtypes. Further, translations or modernizations of the medieval French examples offer the advantage of not limiting the utility of the data to specialists in Old French. Rouquier treats cleft sentences in her first three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to telling readers what clefts are not, as there are indeed many sentences that, on the face of it, appear to be clefts, but are instead something else entirely, such as relative clauses. The list of morphosyntactic indicators of clefts ultimately appears in the conclusion of Chapter 3 (p. 118). This chapter, on clefts themselves, usefully synthesizes other scholars’ analyses of this construction, and weaves them together with tokens from Rouquier’s own corpus, comprised of texts dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century. As a result, she is able to show convincingly an increase over time of the types of elements that can be clefted, particularly with differing types of prepositional phrases. Chapter 4 offers a (comparatively) brief treatment of pseudo-clefts due to the low number of tokens, but is nevertheless able to show a broader typology of the construction in modern French than was found in Old or Middle French. Chapter 5,on phrases liées, a previously under-researched construction, is the standout piece of this volume. It is an exemplary piece of descriptive scholarship that concisely presents an inventory of elements that can appear in the construction, its diachrony from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, a discussion of the applicability of the analysis to interrogatives, and the semantics of the structure. This will make the volume foundational for future work on phrases liées. Although it is unquestionably important to any scholar interested in these three constructions, the pragmatic conditions that produce the constructions, deservedly a focus in the chapters on clefts, fall into obscurity for the remainder of the volume. Despite the reminder that phrases liées are not to be analysed as a type of cleft, and the care taken to present all tokens with ample context, a uniform treatment of the pragmatics of each construction might lend increased unity and utility to an already important work.