Histoire Des Langues Et Histoire Des Représentations Linguistiques ed. by Bernard Colombat et al. (review)

The wide range of topics reflects the scope of the 2016 colloquium from which this volume derives and for which the title provides a suitably broad umbrella. French has pride of place, although Latin, Occitan, Catalan, Italian, Sanskrit, Modern Greek, Proto-Indo-European, and Khaling Rai (Nepal) also appear in the 25 articles. Space constraints only allow selective comments on contributions relevant to French and its development. Banniard argues against the idée reçue that Gregory of Tours's Latin was corrupt, showing it instead to be well constructed and savvy. Trudeau emphasizes forward-looking aspects of Estienne's De Latinitate falso suspecta Expostulatio, including its emphasis on the communicative function of Latin and examples of sermo quotidianus. J.-M. Fournier examines descriptions of determiners in sixteenth-to eighteenth-century grammatical treatises. N. Fournier finds similarities in how French bipartite negation is analyzed by Maupas in the early seventeenth-century and Damourette and Pichon 300 years later. Bouard and Glikman tackle the odd case of adverbial tout, subject to agreement when preceding a feminine but not a masculine adjective (tout contents, toutes contentes), and reveal the influence of Vaugelas on the modern norm. Fordred examines repetitions of che/que in Old Italian and Old French, linking repetition to emotionally intense passages that ostensibly echo oral production. Haßler, examining the absence of reference to grammatical aspect in French grammars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, argues that historical grammars were more oriented to Latin tradition than to contemporary linguistic usage. One of several contributions that illuminate tensions between Latin and French, Huchon offers a detailed account of historical grammatical commentary that valorized French. For example, in the face of Latin's ongoing prestige, contemporary remarqueurs praised the logical cause-effect ordering of French, where Latin placed the effect before the cause. Leclercq examines the loss of the prepositional use of dedans, dessus, dessous, and dehors, now uniquely adverbs, at least prescriptively. The data suggest the influence of Vaugelas and offer a fascinating sociohistorical tidbit: the prepositional use persisted longer among less educated writers. Berré and Pagani-Naudet examine the use of French in Spanish-speaking Flanders, revealing the seventeenth-century remarqueur Chiflet to be adeptly aware of notions like first-language transfer in language learning. Finally, Piron and Remysen trace adaptations of an eighteenth-century continental French grammar in nineteenth-century Quebec, adaptations which generally ignored the endogenous norm. Anyone interested in linguistic historiography will find something in this volume, although its heterogeneous nature poses challenges and precludes any status as a one-stop reference work. Its contributors make the point that linguistic reflection—often quite perspicacious—started well before the advent of modern linguistics, and that many insights in modern linguistic analyses have fore-runners, albeit usually with terminological differences, in earlier—and sometimes much earlier—reflections on language. Attention to the multilingual nature of French society is another strength. In sum, a well produced if somewhat uneven volume worthy of finding a place in major university libraries and on the shelves of researchers interested in close studies of remarqueurs and linguistic historiography.