This sixth edition of A Comprehensive French Grammar is little changed from the previous edition (2003) that I reviewed for JFLS (Jubb, Reference Jubb2003). Apart from an updated bibliography, the principal changes all concern the ‘Introduction’. Most significant is the addition of a section on ‘Medium and register’ (§13), together with references to these topics throughout the main text, e.g. §405 (The imperfect, the preterite, and the perfect); §543 (Negation with a verb); §602 (Dislocation and fronting). The author is careful to warn students not to confuse register and medium, and to emphasise that both ‘high register’ and ‘low register’ may be encountered in either writing or speech.
Further changes to the ‘Introduction’ concern the sections on ‘Capitals’ (§4), ‘Punctuation’ (§5) and ‘Hyphens’ (§8), which have been substantially edited and extended. Apart from the incidental correction of the faulty numbering of the sub-sections in §4 (see p. 5 of the fifth edition), the section on ‘Capitals’ has been extended by helpful additional notes on adjectives/nouns of nationality and an additional point of information about the lack of capitals in street names in French. As ever, the author is sensitive to the difficulties encountered by Anglophone students, clear in his well-illustrated explanations, and interesting in his asides, noting, for example (p. 6), that in the Channel Islands, capitals are used as in English for names of streets, roads, etc.
Anglophone readers are given further consideration with the amendments made to ‘Punctuation’ (§5); the explanatory notes about the use of guillemets and dashes in dialogue and of guillemets for brief quotations within a text are re-ordered and illustrated by four new passages, including an extract from Le Monde (November 2006), in place of the one previous literary extract. Parallel English translation has now been dispensed with, leaving readers to study closely the particularities of French usage, including a new detail about the use of points de suspension to break up a passage of direct speech. Finally, in the section on ‘Hyphens’ (§8, ii), another small, interesting detail has been added, this time concerning names of streets, avenues etc. The meticulous system of cross-referencing is maintained in all the new material, which has been appropriately linked to the rest of the text.
Despite the addition of one completely new section (§13) to the ‘Introduction’, and the consequential combining of the previous sections, §13 and §14, as §14, the paragraph numbering of the fifth edition has been retained in this new edition, thus enabling teachers and their students to use copies of both in parallel without problem, and also giving extended life to the companion A French Grammar Workbook (Engel, Evans and Howells, Reference Engel, Evans and Howells1998).
Further additions (as mentioned by Hare, Reference Hare1994 and Jubb, Reference Jubb2003), concerning the feminisation of the names of the professions (§48) and usage of tu/vous (§196), might have been desirable. However, these are minor quibbles about a work which lives up to its title. It is not only remarkably comprehensive, but also highly readable and easily navigable, thanks not least to its excellent index.
