Nouvelles Voies d’accès au changement linguistique ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett et al. (review)

This volume contains the edited proceedings of the second conference of the Société internationale de diachronie du français, which was held in Cambridge in 2014. It includes an extensive Introduction by the editors, revised versions in French of twenty-four papers originally presented at the conference, a cumulative bibliography and index, and short abstracts in French and English of each paper. The papers are organized in three parts corresponding to the themes of the conference. The first part, ‘New Knowledge Sources for the History of the French Language’, contains eight papers presenting new corpora of letters, chronicles, legal and diplomatic papers, sermons, and theatrical texts. The second part, ‘Representation of the Oral in Medieval Texts’, contains ten papers grouped into two sub-sections: five papers identifying sources of spoken language in medieval theatre, direct quotations, accounting documents, and etiquette manuals, and five discussing the methodology of identifying spoken language in texts that were published before the widespread adoption of quotation marks. The third part, ‘The Rhythm of Linguistic Change’, contains six papers addressing questions of the speed and mechanisms of language change through diachronic studies of French. A common thread in the first two parts is that researchers need to develop new knowledge sources and study the representation of the oral because of shortcomings with existing tools, particularly older corpora such as Frantext and the Base de français médiéval. To the extent that these corpora are based on canonical poetry and novels, they skew our perspective on the language away from spontaneous conversation and towards the literary canon. As Laurent Balon and Pierre Larrivée write, ‘le dialogue représente mieux la grammaire établie d’une époque que le conservatisme de la narration littéraire’ (p. 29). From this viewpoint, it is disappointing that of the six papers in the third part of the book, only one paper (by Maria Vorobei) makes use of a new corpus of legal charters, and another (by Bernard Combettes and Annie Kuyumcuyan) uses a private corpus of texts collected from the World Wide Web; the other four use existing corpora, and three of them use Frantext. We may hope that these authors attended presentations in the other thematic sections of the conference, and in future studies will be drawing on new knowledge sources and extracting spoken language from medieval texts. Overall, this volume brings together an informative selection of recent, innovative papers on the history of the French language that will be of particular interest to historical linguists, scholars of the French language, and researchers in the representation of dialogue.