Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French
Edited by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh
Oxford: Oxford University Press, July 2024, 480 pages, ISBN: 9780192894366, 108 GBP
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Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French brings together two particularly dynamic areas of contemporary research on the French language. The chapters showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics which lies at their intersection. The research across the volume is strongly data-centred, drawing on a wide range of both well-established and more novel theoretical and methodological approaches in order to open up new perspectives on the study of the French language in the twenty-first century. Although it is written in English, the work presented here is underpinned by a range of different approaches from across the Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Particular emphasis is placed on combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, on diversifying tools, methods, and objects of inquiry, and on adopting comparative and multilingual perspectives where these shed new light on important questions relating to French. In these ways, Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French highlights some of the most exciting new directions for linguistic research on the French language.
Table of Contents
1:New directions in the history and sociolinguistics of French, Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh
2:Proclisis and enclisis in early Gallo-Romance: Evidence from sandhi phenomena, Thomas Rainsford
3:The grammar(s) of reported discourse in medieval French literature, Sophie Marnette
4:The evolution of the syntax of the subject in French and factors of variation, Sophie Prévost
5:The evolution of ‘background’ from Middle to pre-Classical French, Bernard Combettes
6:Women and language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795), Mairi McLaughlin
7:The French language and eighteenth-century Italian women: Language of vanity or language of scholarship?, Helena Sanson
8:The construction of authority and community in French official correspondence from Spanish Louisiana, Jenelle Thomas
9:Language authority, language ideologies, and eighteenth-century bilingual lexicographers of French, German and English: Comparing Abel Boyer, Christian Ludwig, and Lewis Chambaud, Nicola McLelland
10:The history of terms for varieties of Gallo-Romance, Douglas A. Kibbee
11:Elision, the neglected link in French phonology, John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze
12:On the rise and fall of modern français régional in the rural Côte d’Or, Rosalind A. M. Temple
13:Attitudes towards the French language: An analysis of the metalanguage used in twentieth-century French language columns, Olivia Walsh
14:Comparing the prescriptivism of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century language experts in France, Emma Humphries
15:Attitudes on Twitter towards French inclusive writing, Anna Tristram
16:Breton dictionaries and contemporary corpus planning: Vocabulary and purism in the minoritized languages of France, Merryn Davies-Deacon
17:France and its difficult relationship with foreign languages, Philippe Caron
18:Minoritized languages in France and Ireland: Policy, practice, vitality, Janice Carruthers and Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín
Janice Carruthers is Professor of French Linguistics at Queen’s University Belfast
Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
Olivia Walsh is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University
of Nottingham
