Wolf's monograph, based on his dissertation, examines ways in which native and nonnative speakers of French use subjectivity markers in personal narratives and in argumentative discourse. This inquiry has two main aims: to identify markers of subjectivity and to see how native and nonnative speakers might differ in the use of these markers.
Chapter 1 argues that second language (L2) subjectivity has been overlooked or even deemed unworthy of attention in the field of SLA. Wolf suggests that existing SLA frameworks, such as Universal Grammar, interlanguage, or the acculturation model, are not well equipped for the study of subjectivity. Instead, he introduces alternative frameworks, such as Austinian pragmatics, Ducrot's illocutionary theory, critical discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics in the French tradition.
Chapter 2 introduces the design of the study and its participants: 18 advanced French students at the University of Cambridge and 15 native speakers of French employed as French-language assistants. The participants performed two tasks: narrative elicitation and a role-play. In the role-play, they were required to ask for a refund in a situation in which they had lost a receipt but had a credit card statement with the name of the shop.
Chapter 3 examines participants' use of personal pronouns, with the focus on the first person pronoun je “I.” The quantitative analysis revealed no differences among the three corpora (first language [L1] French, L2 French, L1 English) in the proportion of first person pronouns. Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, revealed instances of L1 transfer when L2 learners modalized perception verbs. L2 French narratives also contained many affective verbs, whereas affective content was conveyed by means of impersonal constructions in L1 French narratives. Chapter 4 reveals differences in the use of the historic or diagetic present, which was significantly more frequent in L1 French narratives. Chapter 5 shows that in many instances the learners were able to approximate native-speaker models in the use of direct and indirect speech but not in the use of self-reporting verbs.
Chapter 6 shifts the focus from personal narratives to the role-play and examines how L1 and L2 French speakers construct arguments. The quantitative analysis revealed no significant differences in the proportion of modals in the two corpora, whereas qualitative analysis revealed that L2 users of French sometimes appeared too abrupt due to their preference for explicit modalization.
Chapter 7 offers an insightful analysis of several French textbooks, pointing out an underrepresentation of impersonal constructions and an overrepresentation of affective and evaluative verbs.
This volume offers a fresh and stimulating contribution to the existing body of knowledge, yet its main argument about L2 subjectivity being an underresearched area relies on work conducted in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., p. 21). In reality, in the past 10 years, the study of identity, subjectivity, and self-representation has flourished in the field of SLA (for an overview, see Block, 2007). Some recent studies (e.g., Koven, 1998) have even appealed to data collection and analysis methods similar to those used by Wolf, yet the author appears to be unaware of this body of work.
A further confusion arises in the discussion of the theoretical framework, where the author does not make fully clear how the ideas of Ducrot differ from those of Bakhtin and how the approaches developed by Arditty and Vasseur differ from Gumperzian interactional sociolinguistics. The circular definition of “the expression of subjectivity in language [as] the speaker's expression of himself or herself in his/her ‘enonciation,’” or the act of utterance (p. 17), was also confusing to me as a reader. These disconnects and inconsistencies aside, this is an interesting and informative monograph that adds new knowledge and perspectives to the study of L2 learning.
