Le français vu du ciel: voyage illustré en langue française par by Marion Charreau (review)

lexicons abound (etymologically) in so-called pragmatic metonymies. Rézeau examines lexical items in letters written from Guadeloupe in 1843–46 by a visiting Frenchman, whose vocabulary contains forms of interest for the French of the period as well as his native Burgundian dialect and the regional French and creole of Guadeloupe. Finally, Scholz studies lexicons of magic and voodoo, concluding that this specialized vocabulary is not more likely to be of African origin in most FBCs than is the general vocabulary, though the semantic domain of magic deploys French strategies of derivation and composition in interesting ways. In the Dialectology section, Fattier takes on the oldest text in any Atlantic FBC, La passion de notre Seigneur selon saint Jean en langage nègre. Despite its antiquity, the text has only been known to the scholarly community since 1994, and its language is variously seen as a hybrid of different dialects, or as the precursor of a modern FBC. Fattier argues convincingly that it is an early stage of northern Haitian Creole. Le Dû and Brun-Trigaud, authors of a recent linguistic atlas of the Lesser Antilles, report on a linguistic survey of the creoles of Guadeloupe, Dominique, Martinique, and Saint Lucia, with sixty-one color maps showing the dialectal distribution of various phonological forms and lexical items. In the Historical Sociolinguistics section, Ferreira catalogs work done on the endangered FBC of Trinidad, including her own fieldwork, whereas Pustka breaks new ground by examining the speech of the Grands Blancs or Creole whites of Guadeloupe. Finally, Valdman’s interesting contribution closes the volume with a methodological reflection on the reconstruction of Colonial French, using grammatical and lexical data from Louisiana French (including Louisiana Creole) and Haitian. Indiana University Kevin J. Rottet Methods and Materials edited by Frédérique Grim Charreau, Marion. Le français vu du ciel: voyage illustré en langue française. Grenoble: Zeugmo, 2015. ISBN 978-2-37212-003-6. Pp. 121. 29 a. Showing rather than telling characterizes Charreau’s approach to illustrating the French language through beautiful hand-drawn mental maps. Readers follow an unnamed personnage curious to learn more about French as he navigates 39 largeformat two-page color spreads (40 including the index, also drawn as a map) that chart the territories of an imaginary land occupied by different parts of the language (verbs, pronouns, etc.). Bande dessinée meets reference book as the protagonist learns about French while voyaging through territories such as the réserve des déterminants, le plateau des modes, or the undersea tube des pronoms linking the ile des noms to the montagne des verbes. Some maps are primarily form-focused, whereas others give an 206 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 207 overview of a function (e.g., past-time expression). Adjective endings provide an example of the former: Endings appear in clusters, hovering above the village des adjectifs. Here and elsewhere, triangular hazard signs warn of exceptions. Grammatical explanations, when present, occur as dialog between the traveler and a guide. Such explanations tend to be informal and nontechnical: a character representing a noun explains, about adjective agreement, that les adjectifs épousent parfaitement notre forme. Some explanations are more easily understood than others; thus, a noun explains straightforwardly: il arrive aussi que l’on se réunisse pour faire des activités ensemble. Ça s’appelle le pluriel. Charreau’s characterization of sentential negation is spot-on: “la base, c’est ne...pas qui prend en sandwich le verbe.” Less clear, however, is how determiners donnent de l’énergie to nouns, and several noncanonical word orders like dislocations and clefts are conflated as emphatic phrases, with which on exagère, on insiste.Although linguists will object to this explanation (and over-simplification), the author is to be lauded for including such phrases, some of which characterize informal spoken French. In fact, despite extensive use of the traditional metalinguistic vocabulary common to grammar manuals, the tone remains largely informal, by virtue of both informal vocabulary (e.g., se chamailler) and recognition of grammatical traits such as omission of negative ne and interrogatives like t’es où? (albeit without addressing the stylistic subtleties conveyed by different interrogative forms). French language...