{"id":308,"date":"2010-03-11T10:00:56","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=308"},"modified":"2010-02-10T12:12:01","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T10:12:01","slug":"grammatical-variation-across-space-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"Grammatical variation across space and time"},"content":{"rendered":"
Grammatical variation across space and time<\/strong>: The French interrogative system. By Martin Elsig<\/strong>. (Studies in language variation 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. xvi, 282. ISBN 9789027234834<\/a>. $158 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Douglas C. Walker<\/strong><\/a>, University of Calgary<\/em><\/p>\n

This detailed study, an extensive revision of Martin Elsig\u2019s Hamburg doctoral dissertation, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on both historical sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. It applies the tools of variable rule analysis to the extensive corpus of material available on the French interrogative system, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century Quebec French, supplemented by data from late Middle and Classical French literature.<\/p>\n

French interrogatives, both yes\/no-<\/em> and wh<\/em>-questions, provide a complex set of variables for analysis in the direct question domain\u2014for example, pronominal inversion; simple, free\/stylistic, and complex inversion; intonation questions; grammaticalized markers (e.g. est-ce-que<\/em>, –ti\/tu<\/em>); wh<\/em>-fronting; and wh<\/em>–in situ<\/em>). In addition to their social conditioning, these variables show both diachronic and geographic diversity. Therefore, the Quebec data, drawn from the extensive records in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory (led by Shana Poplack), can be appropriately compared to the data from the Hamburg\u2019s Research Centre on Multilingualism (led by Jurgen Meisel) on the syntactic aspects of change in Romance languages. E is thus able to supplement work on European French with synchronic studies of oral data from two centuries of data from Quebec and insert these results into a historical context encompassing roughly five centuries of documentation.<\/p>\n

After a detailed introduction (1\u201312), an \u2018Overview of the literature\u2019 (13\u201332) precedes chapters on \u2018Data and methods\u2019 (33\u201372), \u2018Results\u2019 (73\u2013164), and an \u2018Interpretation and discussion of results\u2019 (165\u2013260). A conclusion (261\u201366), a list of \u2018Literary texts consulted\u2019, references, and an index close the book. The results themselves are of considerable interest, investigating both regionally and historically such factors as subject identity, verb identity, frequency and length, tense and mood, style, and social category as affecting both yes\/no-<\/em> and wh<\/em>-questions. Among other results, the reduction in inversion and the increase in intonation as means of question formation are notable.<\/p>\n

The heart of this study, however, lies in the interpretation and discussion, in which the results of the extensive empirical investigations are brought to bear on questions of syntactic theory. Here, there is an analysis of the interrogative system of colloquial Quebec French (from the extensive corpora in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory), which includes interesting and extensive discussions of the morphological\u2014rather than syntactic\u2014status of pronominal clitics and of the characteristic Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois question marker –tu<\/em> (including the latter\u2019s progressive replacing of intonation questions in Quebec). Then follow reviews of est-ce que<\/em> questions and of the TP (inflectional projection) as the locus for checking the interrogative feature, which leads to a detailed historical review of interrogative syntax from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a time during which unmarked subject-verb inversion eventually became the exception in the modern vernacular. Brief comments on the contemporary standard language and on Old French interrogatives conclude the chapter.<\/p>\n

Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system<\/em> provides a detailed and sophisticated syntactic, historical, and sociolinguistic analysis of a well-documented, complex, and highly variable domain. It shows the benefits of bringing variationist sociolinguistic analyses to bear on current matters of syntactic theory and is a welcome contribution to the literature on both French syntax and syntactic variation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system. By Martin Elsig. (Studies in language variation 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. xvi, 282. ISBN 9789027234834. $158 (Hb). Reviewed by Douglas C. Walker, University of Calgary This detailed study, an extensive revision of Martin Elsig\u2019s Hamburg doctoral dissertation, is a welcome addition to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}