Linguistique contrastive et traduction: les périphrases aller + infinitif et be going to by Laure Lansari (review)

Voix du Nord during the year 2010 more than suffice to illustrate the extent of the problem. Each misuse is followed by its corrigé. In his revisions, the author hints at the grammatical/stylistic considerations he will bring to bear upon the comma conundrum. To account for comma clutter, Barroy makes an intuitive assertion: its usage is poorly analyzed and taught. In his second chapter, the author reviews the history of the comma. This chapter is particularly disappointing, consisting of extensive quotations from two historians of punctuation. The author periodically intervenes with clarifications and expansions. Nevertheless, his voice is overpowered by quotations that can exceed a page and a half. Chapter 3 seeks to discover how the comma is taught. Once again, this section is flawed by heavy citation from pedagogical manuals with minimal analysis. After citing seven sections of the Bescherelle école, Barroy concludes, with regard to its explanation of comma usage: “C’est peu clair, insuffisant, approximatif. Surtout, ce n’est pas opérationnel ” (37). His next illustration cites two and a half pages from a DEUG manual that he subsequently dismisses in two paragraphs. Barroy’s major complaint regarding comma pedagogy is presented in chapter 4, where he explores the relationship between the written symbol and its oral representation. He objects to the conventional claim that the comma is used to mark a pause in speech and makes a convincing case by analyzing recorded books, where the reader frequently ignores the comma or inserts a pause that is not prompted by punctuation. At last, in chapter 5, the patient reader arrives at Barroy’s theory of comma usage: “La virgule balise le texte, elle le divise en espaces prêts à lire, offerts à la lecture, sans incertitudes ni interrogations, sans risques de mauvais assemblages” (47). The comma is a “marking” device, signaling the structure of a sentence, in cases where a string of words might otherwise lead to ambivalence or incoherence . The comma is placed between “assemblages” (verb phrases, noun phrases, and so on) to mark separation, thereby clarifying the proposition. The accompanying examples are clear and useful. The next two chapters invite us to put Barroy’s theory into practice at both the sentence level and in longer reportages. The exercises are essentially the same: we are asked to insert commas into unpunctuated texts. The corrigés would benefit from additional analysis. As it stands, the reader must reconstruct Barroy’s reasoning process. A final chapter explores stylistic factors in comma placement. Although not strikingly novel, Barroy’s theory has the merit of being simple and operational, an asset for the teacher of composition and stylistics. The book as a whole, however, is overburdened with examples and weakened by over reliance on undigested citations. It would be best deployed by an editor confronted with complex texts written by authors who possess a firm control of the language. Cabrillo College/Graduate Theological Union (CA) H. Jay Siskin LANSARI, LAURE. Linguistique contrastive et traduction: les périphrases aller + infinitif et be going to. Paris: Ophrys, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7080-1248-6. Pp. 258. 25 a. This corpus-based study examines the formal and functional associations (and lack thereof) between the periphrases aller + INF and be going to within a theory of enunciative operations framework. Although commonly viewed by traditional grammarians as interchangeable structures arising from a shared underlying cognitive motivation, Lansari convincingly shows through a contrastive study of Reviews 411 translated literary and journalistic texts that there is no true equivalence between these periphrases but rather tendencies that can be systematized in translating. After discussing various issues in the determination of the breadth of the present study (for example, the exclusion of spoken data) and presenting the development of the periphrases aller + INF and be going to within a diachronic perspective , Lansari discusses previous research and inadequacies of frameworks and terminology commonly used to assign meaning to these periphrases. She proceeds to their comprehensive analysis in translated literary and journalistic corpora, examining all 312 utterances going from English to French and 465 utterances going from French to English. In her literary corpora, Lansari finds that be going to is translated 57.7% of the time as aller + INF...