Varieties of Spoken French ed. by Sylvain Detey, et al. (review)

Reviews 273 lexical gaps in the French language with its small set of well-motivated innovations, but paves the way for other contemporary users to take action in situations of expressive lacunae by legitimizing a varied yet thoughtful innovation process accessible to all.As such, its value is all but limitless: for native users of French, it is a documentation of language agility—a testament to all the ways the language could neatly package recurring concepts out of familiar building blocks, but for arcane reasons does not. For second-language learners, it is a documentation of language fragility—a testament to just a few of the language’s idiosyncrasies, with the larger lesson that being a successful language user involves much more than knowing how to assemble familiar chunks of meaning into words that logically ought to exist. For this reason, this book is simultaneously a unique resource for experienced French writers to challenge and diversify their lexicon,and a semantic guidebook for second-language learners building their awareness and written expression one case study at a time. Bibliophiles and Francophiles alike will delight in the impressive artistry presented for reaching deep into the French lexicon and its sociohistorical norms for the sake of engineering one’s own mot juste. University of South Carolina Amanda Dalola Detey, Sylvain, Jacques Durand, Bernard Laks, and Chantal Lyche, eds. Varieties of Spoken French. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-19957-371-4. Pp. 572. Over nearly two decades, the editors of this impressive volume, collaborating with numerous colleagues in France and across Francophony, have developed a highly sophisticated research program on phonological variation: Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC). Speaker data is collected according to a strict Labovian sociolinguistic protocol designed to reveal linguistic variation: informal conversation between an individual speaker and a friend or family member, directed conversation with the investigator, and reading of the standard PFC text and a set of words containing phonological variables. This volume’s thirty-eight contributions fall into two categories: discussion of the theoretical and methodological bases of the PFC project, and presentation of empirical data collected in seventeen Francophone regions in France (Paris, Strasbourg, Pas-de-Calais, Orne, Auvergne, Toulouse, Haute-Savoie, Nice) and in wider Francophony (Belgium, Switzerland, Algeria, the Central African Republic, Mauritius, Quebec, Ontario,Alberta, Louisiana). In addition to these studies of individual speakers, who differ with regard to age, gender, and social status, six studies focus on intra- and interspeaker interactions involving a dozen speakers differing with regard to the aforementioned social characteristics collected in Paris, a small community in the Midi, Switzerland, the Central African Republic, Quebec, Alberta, and Louisiana. The analysis of individual speakers focuses on the variable portions of the vocalic system (e.g., the mid vowels), liaison, and elision. In addition, with the support of the transcript of a brief free conversation sample, other aspects of conversational interactions are discussed, including prosody, syntax, lexicon, and discursive features. For example, these samples of informal features show vernacular interrogative structures (Comment on disait?, Ça a changé quoi?) and left detachment (ben Freddy le train euh, déjà Paris, il m’a dit qu’il n’y allait plus en train). What this extensive mass of data reveals is that spoken French differs significantly from Referential French, the variety described in dictionaries and grammatical descriptions that underlies the variety taught to foreign learners. Examples in the verbal system include the absence of the passé simple, past subjunctive, future perfect, and the free alternation between the simple and periphrastic future.An important methodological article bears on the notion of the norm in spoken French. With regard to the vowel system, in France, Paris still sets the standard. Contrasts such as patte versus pâte or brin versus brun are fading. Relatively new trends include a counterclockwise movement in the nasal vowels, in which /ε̃/ is moving toward /ɑ̃/, and the latter toward /ɔ̃/, and mute e tagging, in which that phoneme is added after final consonants (bonjour[ə], bac[ə]). American teachers will appreciate the focus on North American varieties, to which half of the descriptions of overseas varieties of French are devoted. These descriptions show wide divergences from the Parisian norm, including more complex...