On Spoken French

This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language, by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics, William J. Ashby, and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995), including two real-time studies appearing for the first time in English translation. To help readers visualize just how radically different the morphosyntax, morphophonology, and semantics of Spoken French are from French-on-the-page, the editor has developed a glossing framework, designed to capture the systemic, radically-prefixal morphology of Spoken French and the variability of change-in-progress. The model, presented here and used to gloss the examples from the Tours corpus, is also suitable for corpus-tagging. The volume is organized into sections preceded by an Editor’s note and followed by suggestions for further reading, and closes with an appendix of French corpora. This scholarly edition was written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the field.

Aidan Coveney, University of Exeter, in Journal of French Language Studies (2024).:
This substantial volume will be a welcome addition to the libraries of all universities where research or teaching about French Sociolinguistics is conducted – indeed, it would be an excellent acquisition for all departments of Linguistics. All in all, this volume is a valuable compendium of the collected works of a major figure in the study of variation in French, and a fitting tribute to Ashby’s scholarship and his generosity towards other researchers and generations of students.