Nouvelles Voies D'accès Au Changement Linguistique by Wendy Ayres-Bennett et al. (review)

This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on French diachrony, highlighting a renewed interest in finding new data to illuminate old questions and the application of new methods to old data. Despite the large number (24) and variety of contributions, as well as the project's origin as conference papers (the second meeting of the Société internationale de diachronie du français, 2014), the editors have created a coherent organizational structure centered around three thematic sections: "Nouvelles sources pour la connaissance de l'histoire du français"; "La représentation de l'oral dans les textes médiévaux"; "Le rythme des changements linguistiques". Taken together, this tripartite focus does indeed constitute "un échantillon représentatif des champs de recherche qui sont d'actualité en linguistique diachronique" (19), as the editors argue. The theme of new sources for historical investigation, raised in the first section and the first half of the second, continues throughout the volume so that studies of correspondence (Scharinger; Amatuzzi; Klippi), legal texts and treaties (Balon and Larrivée; Gerstenberg), sermons (Skupien Dekens), and accounting texts (Wirth-Jaillard) are nicely balanced with those grounded in the language of the theater and large electronic corpora. These are also the chapters that engage most closely with the creative role of the individual speaker, in line with the trend in contemporary socio-linguistics and historical studies of other languages such as English. New approaches to the now-familiar topics of orality in written texts and the pace of linguistic change are exhibited in the second two sections, showcasing the contributions of both qualitative case studies and large-scale pattern analysis aided by new and larger amounts of data and computational methods (Parussa; Guillot-Barbance et al.; Scrivner; Siouffi et al.). The third section has the broadest theoretical focus, adding a cross-Romance perspective (Lamiroy) to French-specific diachronic studies, including two focused on the very recent past (Siouffi et al.; Combettes and Kuyumcuyan). Alongside other chapters touching on other disciplines or linguistic varieties: music (Caron) and creoles and language contact (Ludwig; Sharinger), these connections bring an additional innovative element to a volume on historical French. However, text type is the major variable in focus when considering new sources of data, meaning that other sociolinguistic variables such as regional variation (Vorobei) or speaker characteristics (Klippi), which might provide new avenues for investigation, receive less attention. The volume also feels slightly weighted towards case studies of medieval French due to the size of the second section (10 chapters) and its narrower focus. In general, however, the variety of subjects and structures included means that the volume will appeal to scholars of all time periods of French.