Miller, Philip and Zribi-Hertz, Anne (eds), Essais sur la grammaire comparée du français et de l'anglais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2003, 265 pp. 2 84292 133 X

[...]it involves juggling several layers of reality, while trying to follow instructions, construct a shared scenario, and communicate with apparent spontaneity in a second language one is still very much in the process of learning. [...]bare noun phrases, stripped of the information otherwise communicated by the determiner, are essentially restricted to non-expandable intensive constructions (e.g. identity or a particular role or function), whereas in English, they appear less constrained, having three separate uses (species: beavers are on the verge of extinction; generic: cats are mammals; existential: dogs are barking outside). [...]just as the amateur naturalist or lay person, say, can appreciate specic scientic accounts of ora and fauna (not necessarily in the same way as the scientist), so the non-generativist (like myself ) or non-French-English specialist should nd this book interesting, fascinating, even, although a little hard going at times. [...]it gives a brief account of the French equivalent of back slang, verlan, noting how the formation 89 Journal of French Language Studies of its words can cast light on matters such as latent consonants, consonantal clusters and the merger of schwa.