Enquête sur la prononciation du français de référence: les voyelles moyennes et l'harmonievocalique by Marie LandickReview by: Mary Ellen ScullenThe French Review, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Apr., 2006), pp. 1116-1117Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25480491 .

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1116 FRENCH REVIEW 79.5

From the many details presented in this book emerges a complex picture of the back-and-forth shift between documents in the prestige language?Latin in France

and both Latin and French in England?and the vernacular. This shift was finally resolved in favor of the vernacular in France by the Edict of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, and in England by Henry V's preference for English by 1420 and by a 1731 statute requiring English in legal contexts. In very broad terms one observes that

the language of the people in both settings changed from being devalued to being valued as the "langue identitaire" (148) of the kingdom. This change involved a standardization of the vernacular, in which it acquired features of the former

prestige language. Especially fascinating, for example, are the tables showing the direct correlation between the number of letters written in French by the chan cery from 1311 to 1350 and the percentage of silent letters in the French orthogra phy used for these documents (134). Apparently, the more that notaries wrote in French rather than Latin, the more they latinized their writing in French (135). A similar phenomenon occurred in English. As English replaced French, bilingual speakers adapted more and more terms from French to their writing in English (215). Such borrowings may have accounted for as much as 22% of the English lexicon at the end of the Middle Ages (213).

This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in culture, history, and

language use and contact during the Middle Ages. It is, however, a scholarly book that presupposes a familiarity with the geography of France, the chronolo

gy of French and English kings, and with basic Latin and varieties of French and

English. Although it requires some effort on the part of the reader, this effort is rewarded by a wealth of information not available elsewhere.

University of Georgia Diana L. Ranson

Landick, Marie. Enquete sur la prononciation du frangais de reference: les voyelles

moyennes et I'harmonie vocalique. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004. ISBN 2-7475-7000-2.

Pp. 182.16 paper. The realization of French mid vowels has long posed a challenge to teachers

and researchers of French. Landick's book purports to resolve this question with

results from a 1986 study of the realization of mid vowels by a homogenous group of 21 young Parisian normaliens. Landick's objective was to empirically test the conflicting predictions of French linguists with regard to the pronunciation of the mid vowels by studying a group of highly educated Parisian speakers, as sumed to reflect standard French.

The book features a preface by Walter, nine brief chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, three appendices, and a bibliography. In the initial chapters, Landick presents an overview of the distribution of the mid vowels she studied:

[e] and [e] in chapter 1 and [o] and [o] in chapter 2. Chapter 3 addresses the ques tion of vowel harmony and mid vowels.

In each of these chapters, Landick summarizes what previous scholars have writ

ten about the distribution of these vowels in word-final stressed position and in

non-final position. Her sources range from traditional phoneticians, such as

Grammont (1914, published by Delagrave) and Fouche (1959, published by Klincksieck) to generative analyses by Dell (1973, published by Hermann) and Selkirk (1972, unpublished doctoral dissertation). Given the complexity of the data

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REVIEWS 1117

and the lack of agreement on the precise distribution of these mid vowels, it is not

surprising that the various analyses Landick presents are often contradictory. However, it would have been helpful if Landick had provided some type of synthe sis for the distribution of each pair of mid vowels at the conclusion of each chapter.

In chapter 4, Landick presents her methodology, describes her subjects in detail, and elaborates on how her corpus (which can be found in its entirety in the appen dices) was elaborated. In Chapter 5, Landick presents in detail the oppositions in mid-vowel quality, as realized by subjects in word-final position in such minimal

pairs as fee -fait and paume ~

pomme. From her data, Landick draws the conclusion

that the opposition between /o/ and /o/ is more stable than that between /e/ and /e/. Chapter 6 considers minimal pairs such as peche

~ pecker and beaute ~

botte, and Landick observes that the opposition of mid vowels in penultimate-syllable position is highly unstable and is maintained by only a minority of her speakers.

The central question of the influence of vowel harmony on the realization of

non-word-final mid vowels is treated in chapter 7. Landick explicitly tests the

predictions made by Grammont and Selkirk with her subjects and finds that vowel harmony is less pervasive than previous scholars have indicated. In chap ters 8 and 9, the author turns to a detailed, spectrographic analysis of the data of

only four speakers to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of

vowel harmony in isolated words and in words embedded in sentences. These

chapters contain a wealth of tables and charts with formant values. Based on her

instrumental analysis, Landick concludes that although the realization of a mid

vowel in the penultimate syllable does change due to the phonetic context, this

change is not always linked to the quality of the word-final vowel.

The concluding chapter is disappointing, as Landick does not provide an over

all synthesis of her findings. She merely notes that even her homogenous subject group displayed considerable variation in their realization of the mid vowels and of vowel harmony, and she concurs with previous scholars that vowel harmony is not a significant phenomenon in French.

Although a definitive answer to the puzzle of French mid vowels is not to be found in the present volume, this monograph presents valuable empirical data that will surely interest French linguists. It could also serve as a useful reference

volume for an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level course on French

phonology, with the caveat that some students may be frustrated by the lack of definite conclusions.

University of Maryland, College Park Mary Ellen Scullen

Course Materials and Methodology edited by Wynne Wong

Williams, Jessica. Teaching Writing in Second and Foreign Language Classrooms. Boston:

McGraw-Hill, 2005. ISBN : 0-07-293479-4. 209pp. $40.31 U.S.

II est facile de constater, a la lecture de ce livre sur Tenseignement de la produc tion de Tecrit en classe de langue etrangere /seconde (desormais L2), que son au teur Ta redige en se souciant des besoins reels des enseignants. En effet, Jessica

Williams explore dans son ouvrage toutes les facettes de Tenseignement de cette

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