When I was first learning French, back when I was in 6th grade, in 1962, I can remember encountering the fact that there was a past tense form of verbs that was listed in the tables in our textbooks that we did not have to learn. In fact, we were told explicitly that it did not occur in speech, being found rather only in writing, and thus that it was irrelevant to us, as we were following a curriculum aimed at developing our oral communicative skills. I was not much of a linguist then but I do recall being intrigued by the idea that a form could be restricted in its usage in that way, and in my linguistic naïveté, I puzzled over how such a situation could exist and how it could have come into being within a language. Learning that the form in question was known as the âpassé simpleâ only added to my puzzlement, as it did not make sense for something as seemingly odd as that verb form to be labelled âsimpleâ.
In her book presented here, author Emmanuelle Labeau has provided the answers to my naïve questioning and I must say that it was worth waiting 60 years for a volume such as this to appear. As she makes clear, the passé simple has âa not so simple pastâ, and its story, both as to its diachrony and its current status synchronically, is anything but simple. This book answers many of the concerns I have had with the French verb for all this time!
Professor Labeau offers here a thoroughly documented story about the passé simple. It is enriched by the extensive corpus-based work she did across a number of different genres of modern usage to develop the full picture of the passé simple that emerges from the pages of this study. Dr. Labeauâs methodology alone makes this a valuable contribution but the conclusions she draws make it all the more memorable. I am pleased that we can include it in the EALT series.
This volume is the first one in the EALT series to be published in what appears increasingly â we can hope â to be a post-COVID world. The hiatus between EALT 17, which was in production in 2020 and actually appeared in print in the middle of the pandemic, in January of 2021, and this present volume here in 2022, is largely a function of the chaos that we were all thrown into. We expect to return to a more regular schedule in the coming months and years. In the meantime, we can all enjoy this fine work and take refuge from the angst of daily life these days in the excellent scholarship it contains.
Brian D. Joseph
Columbus, OH, 30 April 2022