Galloromania Federica Diémoz, Morphologie et syntaxe des pronoms personnels sujets dans les parlers francoprovençaux de la Vallée d’Aoste, Tübingen (Francke) 2007, xxx + 361 p. + Audio-CD (Romanica Helvetica 126) We are indeed fortunate that this doctoral thesis is now available as a monograph, for it is an excellent study which will be of great interest to dialectologists and Romance linguists alike, not only for the valuable data it reports but also for the methodological issues it addresses. The author has the inestimable advantage of being a native speaker of Valdôtain, the group of Francoprovençal speech varieties of the tiny Aosta Valley autonomous region in Italy, tucked into the corner of the borders with France and Switzerland. Barely 32000 square kilometres in total area with some 120000 inhabitants, the Aosta Valley constitutes a fascinating transition zone between the Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance dialect continua. Since it never developed a written standard language, the region’s towns and villages maintain distinct varieties which nonetheless remain mutually intelligible. One of the most well-known morpho-syntactic features which vary throughout this continuum is of course the presence vs. absence of subject clitics. While the two poles of this larger continuum seem deceptively easy to characterise - either subject pronouns are always required as in standard French, or always optional as in standard Italian - the complex and variable situation in between the two extremes has been the object of much scholarly attention over recent decades, since at least L. Renzi/ L. Vanelli «I pronomi soggetto in alcune varietà romanze», Scritti linguistici in onore di G. B. Pellegrini, Pisa (1983): 121-45. Given the difficulties inherent in eliciting reliable morpho-syntactic data from speakers of non-standard varieties, this study is a very welcome addition in that it gives a richly detailed portrait of pronoun usage in five of the Aosta Valley’s many municipalities, covering the major dialect divisions of this intensely diverse yet linguistically coherent region. The core contribution of the study are the five chapters which each present a systematic and detailed description of the pronoun usage in one of the five municipalities studied: the patois of Roisan, Arvier, Verrayes, Champorcher and Challand-Saint-Anselme. These chapters are preceded by an introduction (vi-xxx) which provides a concise survey of the background scholarship on subject clitic variation (across Romance but with a focus on Francoprovençal) as well as a description of the methods used to elicit the data for this study. For each community, three participants are interviewed, representing three different generations as well as different genders and educational / occupational categories; in addition, the three subjects are selected from different hamlets where possible, in order to explore internal variability within each community. There are many factors which can influence the presence or absence of subject pronouns, and Diémoz wisely constructs a questionnaire (Annexe 1, 337-45) consisting of full sentences which systematically tests and controls for different morpho-syntactic contexts. Foremost among these is of course grammatical person, but other variables are also considered. For each grammatical person, forms are elicited for both vowel-initial and consonant-initial verbs, verbs which are known to have special behaviour (avoir, être), emphatic contexts (which may have stressed subject pronouns) and interrogative utterances. The position of the verb (main, subordinate or conjoined clauses) and the presence of object pronouns were also taken into account. In the third person, specific attention is paid to pronouns of feminine and masculine genders (singular and plural), to the subjects of impersonal and meteorological verbs, as well as to indeterminate subjects, which can be expressed by a range of different forms: first or third person plurals, third person singular indefinite reflexes of unus or «recessive» forms marked with reflexive se. Throughout, Diémoz meticulously reports 305 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus the different responses from each participant, thus documenting the rich variability of various Valdôtain pronoun systems. The use of a set questionnaire made up of full sentences ensures that the same contexts are elicited for each speaker of each variety. In order to facilitate a semi-spontaneous conversation, the questionnaire sentences are inserted into short narrative contexts about everyday life, a technique perfected with notable success by the ALAVAL team (A. Kristol et al., Atlas linguistique audiovisuel du Valais romand, Centre de Dialectologie, Université de Neuchâtel, en cours). Since the Aosta Valley is officially bilingual, subjects are asked to translate the sentences into their local speech variety from their choice of French or Italian, thus ensuring that the translation task starts from the official language with which they are most comfortable. Interestingly, the author’s previous experience (xv N17) indicated that a questionnaire in a local Valdôtain speech variety in fact had the undesirable effect of increasing the number of interferences and calques in subjects’ responses. Diémoz is really the ideal researcher to undertake such a study - a native speaker of a local Francoprovençal variety which is comprehensible for her subjects even if different from their own («En Vallée d’Aoste on a l’habitude du dialogue inter-dialectal.» xvii N22). She can put her subjects maximally at ease by using a familiar speech variety, while her intimate knowledge of the speech communities in question as well as her sophisticated grasp of the relevant morphosyntactic variables allow her to carefully monitor their responses and gently redirect or rephrase the questionnaire items (in either language) if necessary to obtain the desired data. Responses are recorded, transcribed and presented clearly and rigorously, using a modified orthographic system developed by the Bureau Régional pour l’Ethnologie et la Linguistique d’Aoste (xxvii). Each section of each chapter on the speech of one of the municipalities is organized following the same outline, making it straightforward to compare forms from the same context across varieties. One of the great merits of this study is that all the data are reported, including what Gilliéron calls «réponses extorquées»: where participants reply with forms which deviate from the forms sought (different verbs, tenses or grammatical persons, or another construction entirely) these are given in footnotes, so that the reader can see the alternate structures spontaneously used by speakers in translating. All of the data (both the regular answers and the «unexpected» forms from the notes) are also available in audio format on the accompanying CD, so readers can listen to the actual recorded responses organized by chapter and example number, and by note if one wants to, and even compare the sound files with the transcriptions, which seem very faithful to this reader (from a random selection of forms sampled). Following the five main chapters which report the data from the five municipalities, a chapter of synthesis, bibliographic references, four Annexes and an audio CD complete the volume. Building on the brief syntheses at the end of each section as well as a summary at the end of each chapter (with a summary table of pronominal forms for the variety in question), the sixth chapter (Synthèse finale) draws together many of the themes from the different municipalities surveyed as well as overall trends from the whole area studied. As in many other studies of related varieties, the second person singular emerges as the one case where subject pronoun usage is obligatory, even where verb-final morphology alone would be sufficient to distinguish the forms in question (321-22). Diémoz’ data show a three-way division in Aosta Valley varieties between those where subject clitics are used fairly regularly (over 75 % overall in Verrayes), those where subject pronoun usage is largely optional, and those where certain pronominal forms never occur (less than 15 % overall in Roisan). There is also a two-way division between an area where the emphatic (stressed) first-person pronoun forms are reflexes of me and those with reflexes of ego for these forms. Similarly insightful observations are made regarding the number of distinct vs. identical 306 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus forms in each pronominal paradigm, the role of analogy (e. g. in the postposed interrogative -te which generalised to all persons in some varieties) and agglutination of e. g. initial / l-/ or / n-/ (as in etymologically vowel-initial verbs such as lamì «aimer»). In terms of syntactic constraints, there is a notable tendency to avoid preverbal sequences of a subject pronoun followed by an object pronoun: typically one is either omitted or moved to postverbal position. The concise conjugation tables in Annexe 4 also provide a convenient basis for comparing paradigms across municipalities, making clear once again that there is not one single Valdôtain but a continuum of related varieties, each with a range of variable forms. Systematically documenting such fine-grained variability, both in the form and in the usage of pronouns for each variety, is one of the most substantive and valuable contributions of a study like this: as N. Nagy points out («Writing a sociolinguistic grammar of Faetar», Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3 Selected Papers from NWAV 29 (2001): 225-46), it is extremely challenging to write a descriptive grammar which takes into account the variation which is inherent in vernacular varieties. Happily for us, Diémoz meets this descriptive challenge successfully. A number of these morpho-syntactic observations which Diémoz offers us based on her data could lead further formal treatment in a number of possible theoretical frameworks, but the author prudently adopts a largely descriptive approach in this study. She is perhaps implicitly mindful that while linguistic theories may come and go, good data rigorously described will stay with us much longer as a lasting contribution to linguistic scholarship (Theoriae volant data manent, as it were). It is to be hoped of course that this promising scholar will continue to examine the data gathered for this study from a variety of more theoretical perspectives in future analyses. Similarly, the basic statistical treatment of the data (one table with some percentages of occurrences of subject pronouns by municipality, 324) whets this reader’s appetite for possible future studies which examine possible correlations between different demographic categories and linguistic features. There appears for example to be age-grading evidence for a shift towards less subject pronoun usage among younger speakers in some locations, perhaps under the influence of Italian - a possibility which recalls the apparent time construct so dear to Labovian variationist sociolinguistics as well as the Gauchat’s classic 1905 precursor study (newly available in English translation: S. Cummins/ J. K. Chambers/ J. Tennant, «Louis Gauchat - Patriarch of Variationist Linguistics», Historiographia Linguistica 35, 1-2 (2008): 213-74). One aspect in which this work opens a new door for future research is in the attention given to the impact which each participant’s life experiences can have on the choices they make within their range of grammatical options. This is particularly striking in the case of indeterminate subjects: where older speakers might talk about e. g. traditional agricultural activities using a form which implies that they see themselves as potentially among the subjects of the verb, younger speakers may speak of the same action (translating exactly the same sentence) using an indeterminate subject which they identify less with themselves as potential agents. It is insights like these, in the context of a thorough and rigorous dialect study using carefully thought-out methods and a perspicacious questionnaire, which make us particularly grateful for a study like this one, by a scholar uniquely equipped to bring the best of linguistic analysis together with a native speaker’s grasp of her vernacular speech community. David Heap ★ 307 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus