Journal of French Language Studies
here was not random, but correlated with the diffusion of standard language norms
down the urban hierarchy. On the morpho-syntactic level B&S are more receptive to
the idea of interference from the spoken language, cataloguing certain non-standard
features as 'meridionalismes' (e.g. use of de for des and ses for leurs), and looking at the
incidence in the texts of others which had been diffusing through the language and
through society for some considerable time (on v. nous, va chanter v. chantera, ne
deletion, use of fa and perfect tense v. past historic).
The third chapter (pp. 75-143) is entitled La Ciremonie du discours and is concerned
essentially with the pragmatics of the texts. It is perhaps the most innovatory part of
the book. B&S have recognised that there are major areas of language variability
which are not amenable to traditional quantificational analysis a la Labov, variables
above the level of phonetics and morphology which cannot be said to 'mean the same
thing'. In this section B&S relate the linguistic forms selected in the different texts of
the corpus with the situational setting and the social and rhetorical functions the texts
were designed to carry out. They devote attention particularly to the formulaic
expressions used at particular points in each text, to the use of cliches and ritualistic
forms, demonstrating in many cases the narrowness of the repertoire of written forms
available to these 'neo-lettres'.
The second half of the book (pp. 147-292) consists of a careful edition (with notes)
of the texts of the corpus, following a 'code de transcription' which scrupulously
respects their visual and literal integrity, thereby placing at the disposal of historical
linguists a highly interesting body of data in near-totally reliable form.
At a time of increasing interest in the relationship between language variation and
language change, the publication of this book is extremely welcome. The authors offer
us a fascinating insight into the complexity of non-standardised written language,
through an analysis which is at all points carefully measured and imaginative. The only
reservation one might express concerns the bibliography, whose thematic classification
is far from transparent and which leads to an undue amount of duplication.
Anthony Lodge
Department of French Studies
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
(Received 30 January 1995)
Calvet, Louis-Jean, L'Argot. (Que sais-je?) Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994,
127 pp. 2 13 046098 4
Guiraud's book in the Que sais-je? series did sterling service, but after forty years was
inevitably beginning to show its age. As a sociolinguist, Louis-Jean Calvet is par-
ticularly well-placed to take a new look at the topic, in the light of recent progress in
our understanding of the multiple social functions of language. As usual, he is lively
and readable; this is a book which will appeal to a general reader, as well as providing a
good overview of the subject for the more serious student of French.
He starts from an historical perspective, giving a brief account of the slang of the
criminal fraternity, for which we have substantial textual evidence from the fifteenth
century onwards, and noting the way in which slang has nowadays become less of a
secret language and more a marker of informal register or of membership of a tightly
knit social group.
The second and third chapters are devoted to an analysis of the semantic and
234
Reviews
morphological processes typically used in the production of slang expressions, which
are often quite opaque to the uninitiated. The latter includes a useful formalisation of
the 'rules' oiverlan, which has seen such a spectacular rise to prominence in the slang of
banlieusards, and been adopted and exploited in the media. In chapter 4 he discusses 'les
rapports generaux entre l'argot et la langue' and in the fifth he shows how argot has
been exploited for literary purposes, from Villon to the present day.
The fourth chapter is for me the least convincing — lacking in coherence and in
places self-contradictory. Calvet suggests that argot is one of the choices available to the
speaker, part of 'le continuum linguistique . . . qui lui permet de produire des enonces
en langue recherchee, courante, populaire ou argotique' (p. 83); that is, he claims that
argot is in fact a variety, in the technical sense, characterised not only by a specific lexis,
but also by phonetic, morphological and syntactic features. The syntactic evidence he
adduces is, however, meagre in the extreme, and the morphological features he cites
are purely derivational — that is to say, they relate to the lexical rather than the
grammatical level. And yet elsewhere he sees argot as primarily a lexical phenomenon:
'Cet ensemble lexical que constituent les argots successifs a sans cesse alimente le
lexique general . . .' (p. 75).
Is it not more accurate to see argot, not as a register or a sociolect in itself, but as
lexical material which, being associated with the sociolects or registers which people
use in solidary social groups, naturally cooccurs with populaire, familier or courant
grammar and phonology? One problem is that Calvet nowhere defines the key
notions of 'sociolect' or niveau de langue. Perhaps he felt they would be off-putting for
the average reader. This may also have been behind his extremely vague 'definition' of
metaphor as 'tout ce qui joue (souvent de facon plaisante) sur le sens'; this enables him
to subsume metonymy as a mere variant of the same process, whereas it is of course
quite distinct.
One sympathises with the dilemmas facing authors of works of 'vulgarisation',
who must strive to be concise and readable as well as accurate, but Calvet has
elsewhere shown himself to be capable of clarity without distortion, and could have
taken up the space allotted to sidelong glances at English rhyming slang and West
African 'argots a clef (interesting elaborations but not central to his theme) with a
brief discussion of such basic concepts.
In relation to the semantic fields most affected by argot, Calvet provides an
interesting discussion of terms for money, in a section in chapter 2 on the serial
elaboration of items, or 'matrices semantiques' (so that one finds, for example, a whole
series of fruit-based images as slang terms for 'head'). But the 'domaines de l'argot' he
discusses are limited to those of the underworld - police, prostitution, money, drugs -
and are explained as stemming from 'un jargon de metier', or technical terminology,
with a practical function. He makes no real mention of the semantic field of sex, which
has attracted an extraordinarily rich array of slang terms, as illustrated in Guiraud's
dictionary (1978a), nor of the psychological interpretation Guiraud (1978b) proposes,
which seeks to explain also the psycholexical connections between sex and violence.
Perhaps the author was anxious to avoid trespassing on the territory covered by the
'Gros Mots' volume in the same series; but Guiraud's approach to this semantic field
constitutes an important additional explanatory parameter, beyond the purely social,
which merited acknowledgement, if only in the form of a footnote and bibliographical
references.
With these reservations, one can nevertheless recommend the book as an enter-
235
Journal of French Language Studies
taining introduction — uneven perhaps, but with a lot of thought-provoking material,
conveying with real enthusiasm an appreciation of the inventiveness and vitality of
argot, and of its changing social functions.
REFERENCES
Guiraud, P. (1978a). Le Dictionnaire e'rotique. Paris: Payot.
Guiraud, P. (1978b). Semiologie de la sexualite. Paris: Payot.
Hilary Wise
Department of French
Queen Mary and IVestJield College
University of London
(Received 23 February 1995)
Catach, Nina, La Ponctuation. (Que sais-je? n° 2818.) Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1994, 128 pp. 2 13 046050
Recent auteur du Dictionnaire historique de Vorthographe francaise, Nina Catach nous
propose, apres celui sur l'orthographe (dont elle est la mediatique specialists), un 'Que
sais-je' sur la ponctuation. Le format de la collection, 128 pages, amene l'auteur a rea-
liser, sur un sujet aussi vaste et important que generalement meconnu, le tour de
force d'une synthese qui confine a la quintessence!
Des signes extra-alphabetiques ont ete utilises de tous temps: signes de mots, signes
de phrase, qui sont des unites syntaxiques. Indiquant des consignes pour la realisation
orale d'un texte (pauses, intonations, etc.), ils parlent aux yeux et structurent l'ecrit; ils
touchent a la grammaire, a l'intonation et a la semantique, modelent et structurent le
texte. Appelant a une definition theorique de la phrase, l'etude de cet aspect du langage,
appuyee sur les travaux recents en phonetique, informatique, psycholinguistique et
histoire des langues, constitue une discipline promise a un prochain developpement.
La tradition greco-latine nous a legue la distinction fondamentale: ponctuations
forte, moyenne et faible. La ponctuation est nee de differents besoins: lecture, etude
des textes, recitation, chant. La tradition patristique, en particulier Saint Jerome,
institue la premiere ponctuation suivie logique, semantique et respiratoire. En Irlande
puis en Italie, des systemes de plus en plus complexes sont elabores, notamment pour
le chant liturgique.
Au moyen age, la richesse des enluminures cache une pauvrete de signes internes,
parfois remplaces par des conjonctions, qui amene meme a se poser des questions sur la
notion de phrase en ancien francais. Quelques theoriciens medievaux essaient d'elabo-
rer des systemes.
Influenced par l'ltalie (G. Barzizza), la Renaissance apprend a redecouper les textes
pour les besoins du livre, liberant les signes pour leur contenu. Humanistes et impri-
meurs, Lefevre d'Etaples, Geoffroy Tory, Etienne Dolet elaborent des traites. Des
ecrivains, dont Rabelais, s'y interessent.
Si au dix-septieme siecle la ponctuation est encore dominee par l'oral, le dix-
huitieme voit apparaitre les premiers travaux combinant les problematiques de l'oral,
du sens, et du texte. Apres Girard, Grimarest, Nicolas Beauzee, dans YEncyclopMe,
analyse les sens partiels et les degres de subordination, les rapports entre determines et
determinants. Avec l'extension du roman, on invente des signes pour le discours
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