Varieties of Spoken French

ISBN-13: 9780199573714 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 432 str.

Sylvain Detey; Jacques Durand; Bernard Laks

Opis

This book examines the variation found in modern spoken French, based on the research programme 'Phonology of Contemporary French' (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain, PFC). Extensive data are drawn from all over the French-speaking world, including Algeria, Canada, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Switzerland. Although the principal focus is on differences in pronunciation, the authors also analyse the spoken language at all levels from sound to meaning. The book is accompanied by a website hosting audio-visual material for teaching purposes, data, and a variety of tools for working with corpora.
The first part of the book outlines some key concepts and approaches to the description of spoken French. Chapters in Part II are devoted to the study of individual samples of spoken French from all over the world, covering phonological and grammatical features as well as lexical and cultural aspects. A class-friendly ready-to-use multimedia version of these 17 chapters as well as a full transcription of each extract is provided, with the sound files also available on the book's companion website. Part III looks at inter and intra-speaker variation: it begins with chapters that provide the methodological background to the study of phonological variation using databases, while in the second section, authors present case studies of a number of PFC survey points, including Paris, the Central African Republic, and Quebec. Varieties of Spoken French will be an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of all aspects of French language and linguistics.

Recenzje

The edited volume published by Detey et al. provides an excellent overview of the methodology developed by the team and numerous illustrations of the richness of the data elicited. It constitutes a timely and essential publication for any scholar interested in the diversity of French, whether based on location, speaker, or formality ... This book is accessible to a broad readership, but it is also essential reading for French linguists. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a resource to which I will often turn in my own teaching and research.

O autorze

Sylvain Detey is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and French Studies at Waseda University, and was formerly Maître de Conférences at the University of Rouen. His current research interests lie in the use of oral corpora for language education and the role of variation and multimodality in second language phonology acquisition. He is one of the coordinators of the research project Phonology of Contemporary French (Phonologie du Français Contemporain, PFC) and co-editor of Les variétés du français parlé dans l'espace francophone. Ressources pour l'enseignement (2010). Jacques Durand is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès and an Emeritus Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His extensive publications are mainly in phonology (general and as applied to English and French). He is the co-founder of the PFC research project, editor of the OUP series 'The Phonology of the World's Languages' and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology (OUP 2014). Bernard Laks is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Research Laboratory MoDyCo UMR 7114) and a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Until 2012, he was Vice President (Research) of that university and formerly a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). His research and extensive publications mainly address phonology, formal and cognitive linguistics, the history of linguistics, and cognitive sciences. Since 2000 he has been co-director of the PFC research project. Chantal Lyche is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oslo. She has published widely on French phonology and is the co-founder of the PFC research project. Her research has focused most recently on varieties of French spoken outside France, particularly in Switzerland, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Africa. She is the co-author of a standard textbook on the phonology of French and is actively involved in the teaching of French as a foreign language.