This volume contains eight studies devoted to the acquisition of French, as well as a concluding chapter summarizing the findings and looking ahead. It is a rich volume, bringing together research on several aspects of both adults’ and children's French, whether acquired as L1, L2 or 2L1. This rather vast approach, along with the generative perspective adopted throughout, makes the book a valuable addition to previously published volumes on the acquisition of French, which focus on French as a foreign or second language and mainly adopt other theoretical frameworks (e.g. Dewaele, Reference Dewaele2005; Véronique, Reference Véronique2009; Lindqvist and Bardel, Reference Lindqvist and Bardel2014). Unlike many other studies on French (but far from all, see references above), this one has as one of its main aims to investigate the acquisition of French in contexts where languages other than English are present.
The first chapter, Finite verb placement in French language change and in bilingual German-French acquisition, by Anika Schmeisser and Veronika Jansen, discusses language acquisition and language change. The authors investigate finite verb placement in historical French (which, in contrast to modern French, shows V2-characteristics) and in the acquisition of German (a V2-language). They see similarities between the two processes, as it seems that language contact between a V2-language and a non-V2-language, whether from a historical or an acquisitional perspective, can lead to an increasing use of XSV rather than V2 in the V2-language.
Staying with the German-French language constellation in the next chapter, Wh-fronting and Wh-in-situ in the acquisition of French: really variants?, Jasmin Geveler and Natascha Müller investigate the acquisition of questions by German-French bilingual children. Their longitudinal study, covering a period of approximately four years, shows that German seems to influence French resulting in an overuse of wh-fronting structures in French, where other possibilities are available but more rarely used in the data. It also shows that this structure appears early on in the acquisition process.
The third chapter, On the processing of subject clefts in English-French interlanguage: parsing to learn and the subject relativizer qui, is written by Laurent Dekydtspotter and Kelly Farmer. As the title indicates, in this chapter English is one of the languages involved, although the focus is on the L2 French. The main question underlying the study is whether adult second language acquisition is constrained by universal grammar. The results indicate that this is the case as regards the acquisition of qui.
Although the title of the book refers to multilingual contexts, none of the first three chapters actually goes beyond a bilingual setting. Anna Frolova's chapter, on the other hand, includes three languages. Apart from French, her chapter, Verbal transitivity development in first language acquisition, concerns Russian and English, with a focus on the acquisition of Russian L1. More precisely, the author investigates the omission of direct objects in children's Russian L1. The comparison with other studies on French and English L1 indicates that there are differences as regards the length of the omission stage in the respective languages, but that children seem to eventually be able to distinguish pragmatically different contexts in their first language in a target-like way.
Coming back to the German-French language constellation, the next chapter, Static and dynamic location in French and German child language, by Anne-Katharina Harr and Maya Hickmann, concerns language typology and cognitive maturity. It looks at children's picture descriptions in their respective L1s and compares them to those of adult control groups. As predicted by the dichotomy between satellite and verb-framed language families, the results show that speakers of French – a verb-framed language – tend to use more verbs, whereas speakers of German mostly rely on satellites when expressing static and dynamic location. The study also indicates that cognitive factors play a role in the sense that the degree of specificity as regards the choice of verbs increases with age.
The satellite vs. verb-framed language dichotomy is also present in Jeanine Treffers-Daller and Françoise Tidball's investigation of learner French in their chapter Can L2 learners learn new ways to conceptualize events? A new approach to restructuring in motion event construal. They test the hypothesis that adult English learners will transfer patterns of conceptualization from their L1 to their L2 to various degrees depending on proficiency level in the L2. The results do show differences between intermediate and advanced learners in that the more advanced learners do not rely as much on their L1 as do the less advanced learners, but even the advanced learners do not behave as French native speakers in a control group.
The level of proficiency in the target language also seems to be a relevant parameter in A bidirectional study: is there any role for transfer in adjective placement?, by Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes. He investigates how transfer operates when two closely related languages – French and Spanish – are present during the learning process of these languages as L2. Four groups of learners are included in the study, with the less advanced Spanish L2 group differing significantly from the other groups. It appears that learners in this group are less prone to take advantage of the resemblances between French and Spanish, and thus transfer more from their L1.
The last study before the closing remarks is the chapter Parameters, processing and feature reassembly in the L2 French determiner phrase, by Julia Herschensohn and Deborah Arteaga, which is a study of three English-speaking advanced adult learners of French. The results show that the learners are all very accurate in their use of determiners and as regards number agreement, whereas they are not as successful in gender assignment and concord. It seems that L1 transfer can explain some of these errors.
All in all, this is a welcome contribution to the existing research on the acquisition of French. It should be of interest to scholars in various domains including first language acquisition, second language acquisition and language typology.
