À la recherche de la prédication: autour des syntagmes prépositionnels éd. par Christiane Marque-Pucheu, et al. (review)

its pejorative taint, entering the dictionary in 1890 to denote récipients à ordures without any disparaging connotation. In the evolution of this referent, social acceptance motivated semantic change with a shift in register. Another case: the name of King Jeroboam II, the eighth-century (BCE) king of Israel, is the origin of that very large bottle of champagne, un jéroboam. Jeroboam reigned during a prosperous time. His court enjoyed a lavish and eventually corrupt lifestyle. A two-magnum bottle of champagne becomes emblematic of these qualities, signifying la démesure. This collection also prompts reflection on the nature of borrowings, which compose a good number of terms in Maillet’s inventory. Most borrowings are viewed as “conférant à la conversation clarté, saveur et souvent poésie,” as the series editor claims in his preface (3). But in Messieurs les Anglais, pillez les premiers! (2016), Maillet rails against anglicismes, calling them lexicophages, Anglo-Saxon terms that gobble up “native” French terms.What are the criteria for their“naturalization”? Although Maillet accepts sandwich, he condemns “cet horrible ‘coach’, qui [...] pollue notre vocabulaire” (17). It may be argued that sandwich was borrowed because the item was a novelty with no referent in the target language and culture. I would counter that specific usages of coach fill a semantic gap that is not adequately represented by the “synonyms” that Maillet proposes (guide,maître,conseiller).Un coach is not only targeted as an anglicisme but also a sign of American capitalistic or cultural imperialism (e.g.,executive coaching) that Maillet, Hagège, and others decry. Lest we forget,“coach” was a borrowing from French. When tracing the odyssey of words, the linguist would do well to avoid the dédale of linguistic prescriptivism. Graduate Theological Union (CA) H. Jay Siskin Marque-Pucheu, Christiane, Fryni Kakoyianni-Doa, Peter A. Machonis, et Harald Ulland, éd. À la recherche de la prédication: autour des syntagmes prépositionnels. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2016. ISBN 978-90-272-3142-0. Pp. ix + 200. Predicative expressions are complicated, perhaps more so than the basic SubjectCopula -Predicative form appears. Whereas predicative nominals (e.g., “this is a predicative nominative”) and predicative adjectives (e.g.,“they are complicated”) are fairly well recognized, predicative prepositional phrases (e.g., “this book is about predicative prepositional phrases”) are the centralizing theme of this volume. The fruit of a workshop held at University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2015, the ten articles present diverse theoretical perspectives unified by the pursuit of categorizing, differentiating, and integrating analyses of this subset of prepositional phrases.The monograph,mainly in French—with the exception of an English-language version of the Introduction, article final abstracts and two chapters—and about French, nevertheless embraces a 226 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 227 universal perspective, with studies including data from English (Machonis, Violet), Spanish (Müller), Russian (Van Peteghem), ancient Greek (Tronci), and modern Greek (Kakoyianni-Doa and Monville-Burston). The volume stands as a model of productive conversation and common ground among linguists who view grammar differently but share an interest in lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic interfaces, corpus-driven studies, and diagnostic (constituency) tests. Given the number of overlaps between any set of articles, whether the reliance on corpus data (most frequently from Frantext), the specific prepositions studied (most often, but not limited to de, en, and à), crosslinguistic comparisons, an analysis of the (lack of) determiner or the semantics of the object of the preposition, the demarcation of the volume into three sections (Theoretical Studies, Corpus Studies, and Contrastive Studies) seems unnecessarily narrowing.Another set of motifs emerges while reading the volume in its entirety: on the one hand, a careful differentiation among seemingly identical or similar surface forms (e.g., Borillo, Martinot, or Tronci) and on the other, articulating links among apparently different forms or functions (e.g., Leeman, Kellert, or Müller).At the same time, the reader encounters an impressive breadth of forms and functions of predicative prepositional phrases such as genitive (Van Peteghem), spatial (Violet), material (Kakoyianni-Doa and Monville-Burston) and frozen (Machonis) expressions, plus gerund (Martinot) and infinitive constructions (Kellert). While the articles in the edited volume are well written and supported by straightforward examples...