The Sounds of Contemporary French: Articulation and Diversity by Aidan Coveney (review)

226 Reviews on the need for future research into the effectsof the Haitian revolution. One area in particular which is neglected by the strictly historical focus is the cultural influence of the revolution. Nevertheless, this is an impressive, timely collection, one which draws together evidence from France, Britain, Germany, Guadeloupe, Colombia, Cuba, Louisiana, and the eastern seaboard of the United States to suggest the farreaching , multifarious influences ofthe firstsuccessful slave revolt in the New World. University of the West Indies Martin Munro The Sounds of Contemporary French: A rticulation and Diversity. By Aidan Coveney. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications. x + 2i4pp. ?19.99. ISBN 1-902454-02-2. The stated aim of this volume is to 'define a part of what it means to be a native speaker of French' (p. ix). Using labiograms taken from filmed material produced by Bothorel and others at the University of Strasbourg (Andre Bothorel, Pela Si? mon, Francois Wioland, and Jean-Pierre Zerling, Cineradiographie des voyelles et consonnes du francais (Strasbourg: Institut de Phonetique, 1986)), Aidan Coveney offers a detailed articulatory description of the phonemes of French. There are interesting cross-linguistic comparisons, showing how these speech sounds are represented in other languages, and historical light is thrown where appropriate on the development of modern French phonemes, helping to explain their sometimes idiosyncratic real? ization in the orthographic system (see e.g. the discussion of/o/ and /ce/,p. 88). The description of French consonants (Chapter 2) reveals a picture farmore diverse and complex than most accounts suggest. Particularly enlightening here are the ana? lyses of the palatal nasal /ji/,usually assumed rather simplistically to be giving way to \nj\in what Coveney calls supra-local French, and ofthe many variants of/r/ used in differentvarieties of French worldwide. A similarly meticulous description of vowels follows in Chapter 3, which takes up around a third of the book. Here Coveney again addresses issues which are generally ignored in introductory works. Fronting of back vowels, famously reported by Martinet (1958) as C'est jeuli, le Mareuc (reprinted in Andre Martinet, Le Franfais sansfard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), pp. 191-208), is subjected to close analysis, and the tongue position of frontrounded vowels relative to their unrounded counterparts?a question overlooked in traditional accounts, which distinguish only the four phonemic vowel heights?is also examined in detail. There is a full and clear overview of lip-rounding in French vowels, and a very interesting description of Canadian vowels at the end of the chapter. While Chapters 2 and 3 describe the sounds in isolation, Chapter 4 considers the effectsof connected-speech processes. Again Coveney discusses a wide range of phenomena in impressive detail, from vowel harmonization to consonant-cluster simplification and assimilation, showing how sociolinguistic factors such as register may play a role. The author intends his work 'primarily for readers in Modern Languages, in the UK and other anglophone countries' (p. ix), but he does not specify at what level, and undergraduates without a prior grounding in phonetics will probably find it dif? ficult. Of all descriptive linguists, writers on phonetics have perhaps the hardest task. However precisely they are presented in articulatory terms, ultimately one needs to hear the sounds described in order to appreciate the differences between them, and Coveney's thorough and well-researched work can hardly be blamed if this reviewer was leftstruggling with his uvular trills and apical taps. A more important criticism, however, given the importance accorded to the Strasbourg data, is that the labiograms are sometimes a little difficultto follow, particularly when multiple lines are used on the same diagram to represent differentsounds. The book is none the less written with admirable clarity,and teachers especially will welcome the frequent comparisons MLRy ioo.i, 2005 227 between French sounds and their English counterparts. Filling a pressing need for a good accessible guide in English to the phonetics of French, this impressive volume is a very welcome contribution. University of Kent David Hornsby Thinking French Translation: A Course in Translation Method. French to English. By Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge. 2002. xvi + 287pp. ?65 (pbk ?18.99). ISBN 0-415-25521...

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