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French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History by Hugh Dauncey (review)

illuminating essay, on Blanche-Benveniste’s epistemology, Druetta takes a comparative approach, which allows him to reveal how her linguistic thought relates to fields such as generative syntax and sociolinguistics. The volume also provides the opportunity for considering Blanche-Benveniste’s œuvre from different perspectives: Doina Spiţă, for example, highlights her less well-known work on intercomprehension, and Roubaud explores the significance of her work for education from the unique viewpoint of a series of thirteen unpublished manuscripts. A group of papers contributes to our understanding of individual phenomena, in particular at the level of syntax. For instance, Elisabetta Bonvino offers a new analysis of post-verbal subjects in Italian using the grille d’analyse, and Sabio highlights the weakness of traditional grammar that fails to account for the fact that certain complements traditionally considered optional are not in fact so. Although this collection will certainly be useful to those interested in BlancheBenveniste’s contribution to French linguistics, the contributors repeatedly demonstrate throughout the volume that she was not just a specialist in spoken French; indeed, some of the main ‘lessons’ they discuss are relevant at the most general level. Perhaps the most useful contributions are, on the one hand, those that examine Blanche-Benveniste’s work as a whole, and, on the other, those that test fresh ground by applying her methods to new questions and new languages.