The Decline of the French Passé Simple is a detailed study of the French passé simple which brings together theoretical and empirical perspectives. It builds on a long tradition of research on the French TAM system in general and the passé simple in particular, including Emmanuelle Labeau’s own previous studies. The aim of the volume is to provide “a wider and more detailed view of the actual position of the PS in Contemporary French” compared to what has come before (p.7). At a total of nearly 500 pages, this is certainly a weighty volume on a weighty topic, which will be of use to students and scholars alike who are interested to know more about the workings of the passé simple in contemporary French.
The book’s structure reflects the two interests of the Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory series in which it appears: the first half of the book (Chapters 1-5) lays the theoretical groundwork, and the second half (Chapters 6-9) presents the results of a corpus analysis. The Decline of the French Passé Simple starts with a short Introduction, which establishes the interest, complexity, and, at times, paradoxes of the passé simple. It also lays out the four main research questions, which can be summarized as: How has the passé simple evolved over time? What is its status in contemporary French? What factors govern its use? How is the French verbal system affected by changes to the passé simple? (p.7).
After the introduction, two chapters lay the groundwork for what follows. Chapter 1 concerns Language Evolution in general and it is where Labeau articulates her approach to understanding the history, current status, and potential future of the passé simple. She explains that she uses a “dia-model” which “considers variation according to the language user and to the language usage, inspired by Labovian variationist sociolinguistics” (p.34). Accordingly, Chapter 2 examines diachrony, tracing the history of verb tenses from Classical Latin to Modern French.
Labeau then turns to the main focus of the book in Chapter 3, namely the passé simple in Contemporary French. This chapter reviews what is known about the factors, which govern its use, including speaker variables, medium, genre, and linguistic factors. As Labeau herself acknowledges, it is only for journalistic texts that extensive quantitative studies have been carried out (p.137). Chapter 4 explores theoretical perspectives on the passé simple. Labeau offers a detailed account of the main approaches of previous scholars before outlining her own take which is based on systematicity (the passé simple is part of a wider system of tenses) and monoseism (the passé simple has just one value in langue even if it can have a wider range of uses in discours pp.185-186). Chapter 5 examines the tenses, which can be used in Contemporary French in contexts where a passé simple could be found. Labeau proposes the recognition of a wider range of alternative tenses than are usually cited, a proposal which is supported by the results of the empirical study presented in the second half of the book.
The methodology and corpus for the investigation are described in Chapter 6. It is a quantitative and qualitative study of a set of subcorpora which represent a range of media and genres, together constituting around 1.5 million words. Most of the data are from the twenty-first century, although some subcorpora are from the twentieth century to allow diachronic contextualization. The results are then presented in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 reports on the use of the passé simple and alternative tenses across a range of spoken and written genres. Chapter 8 adopts a micro-diachronic perspective to examine the use of the passé simple and its alternatives in newspaper reports of football world cup finals from 1950 to 2010. The quantitative and qualitative data analysis presented in these two chapters allows Labeau to draw a number of interesting conclusions which are highlighted in the short Chapter 9 which concludes the volume. At the highest level, Labeau argues that although there has over the long term been a restriction of use of the passé simple, it is not possible to speak of its complete demise. The results presented in Chapter 7 showed that of the different genres and media, it is written language intended for silent reading which remains the stronghold of the passé simple today. Labeau also suggests that the results indicate that the meaning of the passé simple has shifted from the temporal-aspectual domain to socio-stylistics.
The Decline of the French Passé Simple is certainly a valuable contribution to research on the passé simple. The first half of the book will be a useful resource for people looking for a wide-ranging but comprehensible overview of previous work on this tense. Anglophone readers will find it especially helpful to have summaries of the approaches of scholars such as Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon or Gustave Guillaume who are less well-known outside the Francophone tradition. The results of the empirical study will also be of value. There is no doubt that the largest study to date of the passé simple has advanced knowledge in this field, especially highlighting the range of other tenses that can fulfil the traditional function of the passé simple, and in underscoring the importance of genre-based variation. Some limitations to the study mean that more work in this area remains to be done. In particular, although inspired by variationist sociolinguistics, the methodology and scope of the study did not allow any firm conclusions about the influence of diastratic and diatopic factors, as Labeau herself admits (p.435). In addition, journalistic texts remain a significant focus of this volume so future research will need to focus on other genres in order to address the asymmetry in the field that Labeau herself identified (p.137).
