La variation pluridimensionnelle: une analyse de la négation en français by Charlotte Meisner

Reviewed by: La variation pluridimensionnelle: une analyse de la négation en français by Charlotte Meisner Bryan Donaldson Meisner, Charlotte. La variation pluridimensionnelle: une analyse de la négation en français. Peter Lang, 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-2085-6. Pp. xiii + 324. Contemporary spoken French frequently realizes sentential negation without preverbal ne. Behind this apparently simple phenomenon lie numerous and complex factors that have generated a considerable research literature. Meisner admirably condenses this literature and contributes a potentially important perspective to our understanding of ne in modern French, all the while demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of multiple and sometimes disparate approaches (e.g., generativism, Labovian sociolinguistics, Koch and Oesterreicher's Sprache der Nähe, der Distanz, diachrony, and phonology). Space constraints aside, the literature review would have been strengthened in places by more critical synthesis and evaluation (e.g., Ashby's position that ne usage reflects change in progress versus Blanche-Benveniste and Jeanjean's claim of age-grading within stable variation). Similarly, claims about ne retention in the Midi are based on fairly scant empirical evidence. Despite these and similar critiques, this section will be read profitably by any researcher interested in contemporary French negation and provides a good orientation to existing research. Meisner's study draws on her original corpus of what she terms français phonique (to avoid register connotations with terms like français parlé). The corpus includes 72 speakers—mostly but not exclusively monolingual native speakers—from France and Switzerland in contexts of communicative "immediacy" and "distance." In total, the corpus yields 334 occurrences of negation—just over 6 per speaker—a modest figure that begs caution when interpreting certain results. The 18% overall ne retention rate corroborates other recent corpora, as does the observation that most speakers realize ne more frequently in formal/distant registers. The highlight is Meisner's proposal that ne realization depends primarily on prosodic factors. Rejecting or only partially accepting earlier explanations that point to sociolinguistic factors, the presence of other preverbal clitics, or pragmatic factors like emphasis or microstylistic shifting, Meisner offers compelling arguments that factors like subject weight (e.g., lexical vs. [End Page 203] clitic) and the presence of a complementizer in embedded clauses align with prosodic properties to influence the realization of ne. In a nutshell, ne is omitted to bring an initial phrasal stress closer to its preferred position. Strengths of the proposal include the fine-grained treatment of phonological context, the treatment of subject types as a continuum rather than a binary distinction (lexical vs. pronoun), and the inclusion of dislocated subjects. It seems unlikely that the behavior of ne can be entirely reduced to effects of prosody, however, and this volume will not lead researchers to cast aside decades of earlier findings. More realistically—as the author acknowledges—prosody is an additional piece of an exceedingly complex puzzle. In isolation, the prosodic hypothesis leaves numerous questions unanswered: Why have rates of ne declined over time, even with lexical subjects? Why does Canadian French evince significantly lower rates of ne than the French of France? Could ne eventually disappear from spoken French given current prosodic patterns? Persistent copyediting oversights are a bémol. On the whole, however, this volume is valuable and recommended. It provides new perspectives and testable hypotheses that should advance the rich debate on variable negation in French. Bryan Donaldson University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

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