Langue parlée: norme et variations ed. by Hélène Huot (review)

as religious vocabulary in selected novels published during the eighteenth, nineteenth , and twentieth centuries; strategies for treating a relatively smaller corpus, namely the writings of Rimbaud; and an extension of previous comparisons of Proust and Giraudoux. Since each chapter is the product of a previously published article, the reader can explore them in any order. It would also be possible, in some cases, to identify a single type of analysis across chapters; this task would be somewhat difficult, however, given the lack of an index. Nonetheless, the variety of texts analyzed and the wide range of methodological and analytical strategies provide the reader with an enormous amount of valuable information at the intersection of literary studies and corpus linguistics. Although many technical terms are explained, this volume will mainly be accessible to faculty and advanced graduate students, especially those with a working knowledge of statistical terminology and procedures. University of North Texas Lawrence Williams HUOT, HÉLÈNE, éd. Langue parlée: norme et variations. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée XVII-1. Amsterdam: De Werelt, 2012. ISSN 1386-1204. Pp. 143. 30 a. The concepts of norm and variation, which prove to be remarkably challenging and potentially divisive, are found repeatedly as variants of titles of works about spoken language. Given this trend and this particular volume’s conventional cover, the reader may be surprised to discover such valuable and original contributions to this domain of research. Admittedly, in this journal’s second volume addressing “le thème de l’oral” (5), there is an underlying call to reconsider and redefine norms based on access to and analysis of varieties. An alternative subtitle of this eight-article publication, however, could very well be: how is corpus -based research changing what we know about language? The volume begins with three exceptionally clear and informative articles containing descriptions of large-scale corpora, notably available to researchers on the Internet, and a couple of examples of associated research: Eychenne and Laks’s work on Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC), followed by an article on its English-language counterpart Phonologie de l’anglais contemporain (PAC) by Durand and Przewozny, and then Gadet and others on the Corpus international écologique de la langue française (CIEL-F). Together with the corpus-driven work by Detey and Racine on pedagogical pronunciation norms and Adda-Decker and others on liaison, these five contributions are well suited to be in the same volume, with each containing specific references to at least one of the other projects. Although the corpus programs mentioned above offer potential avenues for analyses in syntax, discourse, and sociolinguistics, the volume is overall unbalanced in terms of its primary focus on elements of phonology, predominantly investigating topics such as pronunciation, liaison, stress placement, and so on. There are two notable exceptions to this orientation. The aforementioned CIEL-F article presents several syntactic applications of the corpus, and Blondeau’s article examines morpho-syntactic variation in Montreal French. The latter, with one of the most direct and succinct accounts of the problematic concept of la norme, investigates a hypothesis of language change using a longitudinal corpus. A diachronic leitmotif of this volume connects Blondeau’s work with the significant study by Boula de Mareüil and others on the variation of French journalistic 1010 FRENCH REVIEW 86.5 prosody from 1940–97. The impassioned article by Gil Fernandez constitutes an exception to the direct focus on language corpora but articulately supports the need to put an end to the research/application dichotomy. This ardent, pedagogically -minded work is a befitting companion to the aforementioned article by Detey and Racine that looks to redefine norms used for didactic purposes in français langue étrangère, regarding both input and output according to findings from corpus data. Course directors, applied linguists, applied phonetics instructors, and foreign language education specialists are apt to find this volume particularly useful and even inspiring. Furthermore, the articles serve as a valuable compilation of resources expandable beyond the phonological level for researchers of elements of spoken (French) language. As a whole, it is not entirely accessible to the uninitiated in linguistics due to the linguistic jargon and detail in the...