By focusing on non-literary texts in its first part, historic texts representing deliberately or incidentally spoken language in the second, and differential rates of change in the third, this collection of 25 papers presents three broadly defined new approaches to language change, mainly throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Rather than attempt to review every contribution, I have chosen to sketch in broad terms the themes of each section, making a purely personal selection for slightly more detailed discussion.
The first part brings together studies involving a variety of genres ranging from legal and diplomatic texts to sermons and private correspondence, none of which have received much attention from linguists, even though they are greatly used by scholars in other disciplines, particularly historians. Several contributions report on initial or early samplings of large, increasingly digitised corpora in an effort to show how the latter can potentially benefit future research, provided sample sizes are further extended. Laurent Balon and Pierre Larrivée (23–38), for instance, provide evidence for the striking and relatively early decrease in null-subject forms in legal texts compared to literary writing. Carine Skupien Dekens’ work on a sample of Protestant sermons (69–84) shows how, over a period of 200 years (1550–1750), archaisms characteristic of Calvin’s translation of the Bible (dating from 1588) are increasingly modernised, even in relatively formal speech. Making sensitive use of historical and linguistic evidence (particularly relevant regional forms), Ralph Ludwig (143–177) builds a well-argued case for a two-stage emergence of Martiniquais Creole.
The second part focuses on texts in which speech representation is either deliberate (plays, courtly novels, comic texts, language teaching manuals) or incidental (accounting records of offences sanctioned by fines). Some of the studies in this section tackle questions of pragmatics such as thanking, diffamation, and evidentiality (i.e., assertion of truthfulness), while others look at discourse markers, including interjections and parenthetical constructions (incises). Corinne Denoyelle’s contribution (253–278) considers the pragmatics of thanking, bringing to light how significantly medieval norms differed from those of the modern era. Daniéla Capin’s investigation of interjections (297–316) shows their multi-functionality, inter alia as discourse markers. Gerda Hassler’s study of ja/déjà(355–370) shows how the full range of functions of Latin iam(adverbial and discourse marker) was not immediately reproduced in early French texts but instead ‘reacquired’ over time. Amalia Rodríguez-Somolinos (335–354) shows how the use of si vraiement comas an expression of evidentiality shifts from the purely ritualistic in medieval prayers to a more generalised assertion of truthfulness in later centuries.
Not that grammatical issues are ignored: Gabriella Parussa (181–199) discusses left and right dislocation and the expression of future time, and Laetitia Sauwala (201–220) and Évelyne Oppermann-Marsaux (221–237) consider ne omission in interrogative structures in medieval and 16th century texts, respectively. One of the perhaps unsurprising overall findings that emerges is that most linguistic changes appear earlier in texts that more closely represent speech (plays as opposed to novels, verse compared to prose).
Studies in the third part deal with differential rates of changes over various time periods, ranging from two millennia to just a few years. Of the two contributions taking the long view, Olga Scrivner’s study (393–411) adapts variationist techniques to chart the shift from OV dominant word order in Latin to VO dominant word order in medieval French. Béatrice Lamiroy’s study (373–391) takes a cross-language perspective tracing changes in the use of the subjunctive and the development of partitive constructions from Latin to modern French, Spanish and Italian, showing that, in both cases, contemporary French usage patterns differ more from those of the parent language than the patterns observed in Spanish and Italian.
Three contributors consciously take a shorter term perspective. Jaroslav Štichauer (457–474) discusses the productivity of the lexical morphemes -age and -iste, comparing data from the 16th and 17th centuries. Two studies of contemporary writing cover, in one case, a period of a few decades and, in the other, a mere matter of about a decade, largely the 1990s. Bernard Combettes and Annie Kuyumcuyan (439–456) demonstrate the recent emergence of dû à as a complex preposition, as opposed to an adjective participle phrase. Gilles Siouffi, Agnès Steuckardt and Chantal Wionet (421–437) focus on what they call an incomplete change: the use of quelque partas a discourse marker, as opposed to an adverbial of place, showing a brief peak of frequency, at least among certain authors, only, it would seem, to fall out of favour.
The latter studies could not have been undertaken without either electronic databases or computerised corpora. But the emergence of such tools has undoubtedly also injected new vigour into the study of language history, as demonstrated by the rich variety of this collection, which comprises studies of interest to scholars working on the history of French, in pragmatics and in discourse analysis. Despite its considerable volume, the collection does not purport to be an overview of the field, including as it does items peripheral to the general themes, such as the study of idiolectal material. Undeniably, however, it is testament to the vigour of research in the field of language history and, in a number of cases, to the fact that much-studied data can yet yield worthwhile insights.
