Chuquet, Jean (ed.), Verbes de parole, de pensée, de perception. Etudes syntaxiques et sémantiques. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003, 240 pp. 2 86847 885 9

[...]we have to say that this book represents a ne contribution not just to French lexicography, but also to our understanding of late medieval French theatre. The next section is on lexicography and semantics (both historical): O. Gsell asks the fundamental question, Was haben historische Semantik und Etymologie voneinander zu erwarten? and concludes that despite divergent objectives they are mutually dependent, and that developmental semantic explanations are an indispensable component of satisfactory etymology; T. Stadtler reviews euphemisms in French lexicography, with eighteen case-studies of semantic change which involve euphemisms and which the author explains (a demonstration, then, of Gsells point);M. Pster studies the concept of head in (mainly) Italian, offering a fascinating preview of the (currently) 554-page long LEI (manuscript) article caput; G. Ernst explores lexical aspects of non-standard French texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but 105 Journal of French Language Studies concludes that semantic theory is not conspicuously helpful to the editor seeking to publish and understand these texts. The study is of particular interest in light of the work of Armstrong and Boughton (Armstrong, 2001: 2), who have made claims, which are at once highly plausible but as yet only partially substantiated, regarding the spread of Ol French over the whole of the ancestral langue dol area, apart from the Nord-Pasde-Calais, leaving only the area south of the Garonne and the Massif Central, Alsace and the Breton-speaking west of Brittany, plus the so-called peripheral varieties of Belgium and Switzerland. [...]given the accumulation of anecdotal observation (e.g. Wanner, 1993) and the lack of solid counter-evidence, Armstrongs claims may well be under- rather than over-stated (Pooley, 2004), and so it is interesting to reect on the ndings of a micro-study in a small village in Normandy (Sainte-GauburgeSainte-Colombe in the Orne; population 1,233) that lies well within the area around Paris already labelled way back in 1968 by Pottier as showing no social practice of local dialects. [...]this Norman is used in more or less undifferentiated fashion over an area corresponding to Basse-Normandie, for the older generations, but extended nearer to the Channel coast for the youngest informant (p. 71).