15.3244, Review: Lang Desc/Applied Ling: Price (2003)

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3244. Thu Nov 18 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.3244, Review: Lang Desc/Applied Ling: Price (2003)                                                                                                                                                                    

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Collberg, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Shiela Collberg at collberg at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 17-Nov-2004
From: Ioanna Sitaridou < ioanna.sitaridou at uni-hamburg.de >
Subject: A Comprehensive French Grammar 
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 18:56:40
From: Ioanna Sitaridou < ioanna.sitaridou at uni-hamburg.de >
Subject: A Comprehensive French Grammar 
 

Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 21:02:20 +0000
From: Ioanna Sitaridou <secd024 at uni-hamburg.de>
Subject: A Comprehensive French Grammar, 5th ed.

AUTHOR: Price, Glanville
TITLE: A Comprehensive French Grammar, fifth edition
SERIES: Blackwell Reference Grammars
YEAR: 2003
PUBLISHER: Blackwell Publishing
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-918.html


Ioanna Sitaridou, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 
University of Cambridge

This textbook introduces students with no knowledge of linguistics but with 
considerable knowledge of French to the various aspects and phenomena 
of French Grammar. The book comprises five chapters (introduction, the 
noun phrase, verbs, the structure of the sentence, and adverbs, 
prepositions and conjunctions), a contents list, an appendix, an index, a 
bibliography list and a terms and abbreviations list (the last two 
immediately following 'contents'). Each chapter follows a different 
organisation, however they all have an introduction but yet no summary.

Chapter 1 (Introduction) basically presents the French alphabet, its phonetic 
transcription and all the conventional orthographic rules for French. More 
explicitly, it covers the mute vs the aspirate 'h' (that is, the fact that 'h'
is not 
pronounced but sometimes counts as mute and sometimes as aspirated), 
capitalisation (i.e. 'le Canada' BUT 'le jeudi' NOT 'le Jeudi'), punctuation, 
division into syllables, hyphens, accents and cedilla, diaeresis (i.e 'Saül' 
NOT 'Saul') and elision (i.e 'j'aime' NOT 'je aime').

Chapter 2 (The Noun Phrase) discusses the basic morphological structure of 
the noun phrase. Apart from the Introduction, there are sections on the 
functions of the noun phrases (i.e. the subject, the complement of the 
subject (sic), the object, the genitive, the complement of the proposition), 
possessive function, determiners, gender, number, miscellaneous [sic], 
adjectives and degrees of comparison, pronouns and quantifiers, etc.

Chapter 3 (Verbs) deals with the verbs and either defines or discusses 
topics such as the following: conjugations, moods and tenses, the persons 
of the verb, defective verbs, the morphology of the verbs, reflexive verbs, 
the passive, negative and interrogative conjugations, person and number, 
tenses, infinitives, participles, moods, modals, imperatives, idioms, etc.

Chapter 4 (The Structure of the Sentence) is concerned with the syntax of 
French. It deals with four phenomena: negation, interrogation, inversion, 
and dislocation and fronting.

Chapter 5 (Adverbs, Prepositions and Conjunctions) describes first, the 
different types of adverbs according to their semantics; second, simple and 
complex prepositions and which verbs subcategorise for what preposition 
(what the author calls 'government of verbs by prepositions', p. 501) as well 
as their semantics; third, the types of conjunctions and whether they require 
indicative or subjunctive.

Finally, the Appendix briefly describes the type of expressions used to 
interrogate about age, time, price, dimensions, speed, and fuel 
consumption.

Writing (or rather rewriting in this case since the book already counts its 
fifth edition) a grammar book is by no means an easy task and it could not 
be exhaustive and yet user-friendly at the same time. The advantages of 
this textbook are first, that it is suitable for other types of reading such as 
browsing. The short numbered paragraphs -- very much in the spirit of 
Grevisse's (1993) seminal 'Le bon Usage' grammar -- may read 
as 'rubriques', particularly suitable for quick browsing.

Second, it uses a wealth of examples (although the source is most of the 
times not acknowledged) and it makes clear the distinction between spoken 
and written language, a rather important dimension of today's French, and 
one, which is most often overlooked by both grammarians and syntacticians.

However, there are quite a few points to criticise. The first point has to do 
with the fact that in the preface it is not identified what the goals are set out 
to be and what the target audience is supposed to be. What we know -- 
namely that is intended for advanced learners of French -- comes from a 
few lines on the back cover of the book. Having said that, it is worth 
mentioning that Price might have chosen not to be explicit over this issue 
simply because the book is a revised version of an existing classic: 
Comprehensive French Grammar with Classified Vocabularies (1950) by L. 
S. R. Byrne and E. L. Churchill, where the goals presumably are more 
saliently defined. At the same time however, the author states that the book 
is an altogether 'new' grammar, thus the sole authorship, and in this sense 
we would expect him to reinstate the aims of the book and identify the 
target audience.

Second, this is a heavily prescriptive grammar. Quite often the 
terms 'traditional' grammar and 'prescriptive' grammar are used 
interchangeably, however in this case we clearly deal with a grammar of an 
over(t)ly prescriptive character without some of the values attributed to 
traditional grammars (i.e. in 'va-t-il' type of examples, epenthetic 't' is not 
labelled as a phonological process called epenthesis but rather it is 
described as an insertion of 't', the implication being that it is particular to 
this type of construction). More explicitly, the author uses expressions, such 
as '... in certain circumstances one must (bold in the original) use the 
subjunctive (and, in others, that one must (bold in the original) use the 
indicative' (p. 358); 'In speech, the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive 
should always (bold in the original) be ...' (p. 382). The obvious question to 
ask here is whether prescriptivism can be avoided in second language 
acquisition. My personal view is that a certain amount of rule-learning is 
inescapable but crucially this can be done in various ways -- the one I am 
ascribing myself to is by providing explanations along with 'dry' rules. But 
more on this point next.

Third, there is often a problem of organisation of the textbook. In 
formalistic terms, the Contents section is rather idiosyncratically compiled 
in that it has no chapter or section numbering. It is also not clear when 
sections carry a numeral (a Roman as in some sections of Chapter 3 but 
none for the same level of embedding in Chapter 2) and when they do not. 
It should however be mentioned that paragraphs do carry a number. In 
terms of organisation of the material, problems often arise because of the 
unclear distinction between morphological and syntactic treatment of the 
phenomena (to the extent of course this is always possible to disentangle). I 
exemplify by means of two examples: first, in Chapter 2, in the section 
about the functions of the noun phrase, the function of indirect object is 
not included. More precisely, it is set apart, namely by heading a separate 
section (here the section coincides with the paragraph number hence I can 
identify it as number 21). There is no reason whatsoever for the indirect 
object not to be included in the section about the syntactic functions. I 
guess the author wants to put emphasis on how English is different from 
French in terms of marking the object. Second, in Chapter 3, in section N 
on 'Moods' it is not clear at all why infinitives, participles and gerunds 
should be considered as moods (especially the last two ones). Third, in 
Chapter 4, it is not clear why the structure of the sentence should only 
contain negation, wh-constructions, inversion, dislocation and fronting. 
The point being that all sorts of other phenomena could also have been 
presented from a syntactic point of view, i.e. the noun-adjective ordering, 
control constructions, the licensing of subjects, passives, just to name a few.

Fourth, and to me this is the most deficient aspect of the textbook, there is 
complete lack of explanatory adequacy and intention of building up meta-
linguistic awareness. To put it differently, it scores very poorly in explaining, 
although in all fairness this seems to lie outside the author's aims. For 
instance, on p. 358 it says '...that we shall not attempt to define the 
term 'mood' ...'; on p. 15 it uses the term subject without attempting to 
define it. It is expected by the student to grasp the term by mere exposure 
to the underlined parts of the examples. However 'immersion' is a 
communicative teaching method and thus fails in written textbooks. The 
obvious question then -- and which we raised earlier -- is to which extent 
second language acquisition is sustainable in this prescriptive manner, and 
moreover how suitable it is for university students of French. I would like to 
suggest that the way to teach 'French Grammar' or 'Introduction to Any 
Grammar' -- at university level in particular -- should be done by using the 
tools of linguistic theory. Furthermore, the book does not take into 
consideration the results of current syntactic research, so for instance, it 
does not mention the aspectual information that the verb may carry in 
French (cf. the Chapter on the 'Verbs', p. 310) and tries to capture the verbal 
system solely in terms of the tense-mood distinction; or on another 
occasion it does not make the distinction between morphological and 
abstract Case, and therefore it is said that French does not have a genitive 
Case (sic) (cf. p. 15).

Finally, there are a few typographical errors, and although the less 
problematic aspect for me, I will briefly mention two: on p. v, 'partitive 
articie' instead of 'partitive article'; on p. 5 'le due de Bourgogne' instead 
of 'le duc de Bourgogne'.

Overall, this is a useful reference grammar which may work well in 
conjunction with other textbooks for first year English-speaking students of 
French as well as for English-speaking teachers of French.

Byrne, L. S. R. & E. L. Churchill (1950) Comprehensive French Grammar with 
Classified Vocabularies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grevisse, M. (1993) Le bon usage. Grammaire française, 13th ed., recast by 
A. Goosse. Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ioanna Sitaridou is University Lecturer in Romance Philology at the 
University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens' 
College. Her main areas of research are synchronic and diachronic syntax, 
in particular: acquisition, language contact, dialectal variation, and 
language change. Her 2002 doctoral dissertation is entitled 'The Synchrony 
and Diachrony of Romance Infinitives with Nominative Subjects'. During her 
postdoctoral research at the University of Hamburg, she worked on the 
licensing of null subjects in Old French dialects, and the development of 
overt subjects in the history of French.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3244