This monograph is the third volume in John Benjamins' relatively new series “Studies in language variation”. The word space in the title refers to Elsig's comparative analysis of interrogatives in European French and Quebec French. The word time is used in the title because Elsig provides a comprehensive overview of interrogatives as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Middle and Classical French (MCF) periods. Elsig also uses more recent data from the Récits du français québécois d'autrefois (RFQ) corpus (ninteenth century) and the Ottawa-Hull (OH) French corpus (twentieth century). The use of both written and spoken discourse is a great strength of this study of French yes/no and wh-questions, and an additional positive feature of Elsig's work is the focus on “actual language usage” (2). Moreover, “[t]he analysis of spontaneous speech data helps to circumvent and eliminate normative interference from the informants' side” (2).
Elsig clearly lays out the aims and the topic of investigation, including appropriate and informative examples, in the introductory chapter. The first overarching objective of the study is to examine the evolution of interrogatives using the three data sources mentioned above: MCF, RFQ, and OH. This part of the study allows for the analysis of certain variants in specific linguistic contexts. “The second central aim of this study is hence to provide, within the generative paradigm, a syntactic model of the informants' internal grammatical system with regard to French interrogatives” (11).
Ch. 2 provides a review of the literature that is both comprehensive and organized in such a way that it can be read in a linear or nonlinear fashion, depending on the reader's preference. The main section of Elsig's review of the literature (“Descriptive and corpus-based analyses of French interrogatives”) contains four subsections: pronominal inversion, intonation questions, -tu questions, and est-ce que questions. This chapter also provides a review of grammatical treatment of the variants, including “statements made in the normative and prescriptive literature and grammars with regard to the yes/no interrogative variants” (27–28).
Ch. 3 offers a thorough description and explanation of the data and methods, beginning with methodological fundamentals of variation theory, which would certainly be useful for readers who are unfamiliar with variationist (socio) linguistics. Ch. 4 presents and summarizes the results of the two variable contexts that are the focus of the study: French yes/no questions and wh-questions. In the following chapter, Elsig discusses the results, beginning with the most recent data used for the study (i.e. OH), then moving to the data from the ninteenth century (RFQ), and finally to the MCF data. Ch. 6, the concluding chapter, provides a clear and concise summary of the main findings.
