Introduction to French Linguistics. (= LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 21).

This textbook targets advanced undergraduate students and graduate students in French Departments in the United States. Most of the time, this introductory course is the first contact of the students with linguistics. Therefore, the book will provide, through the study of French linguistics, the main concepts of general linguistics. Very often, linguistic textbooks are at pain to contrast linguistics with normative grammar and to provide the best formal criterion, morphological or distributional, as opposed to the notional criteria of school grammars, to define the grammatical categories of noun, word or subject. Written in the framework of Cognitive Grammar, a more recent approach to linguistics, this book takes a more conciliatory position. Indeed, according to Cognitive Grammar, linguistic categories are not defined by one necessary and sufficient condition like mathematical categories but by a set of characteristic features. Prototypical members share all the characteristics while marginal members may violate some properties and are connected to the category by a family resemblance. Therefore, notional and formal criteria contribute to the definition of the main concepts in linguistics. Thus, the student learns all the criteria advocated by the different linguistic schools without having the painful impression of entering a battlefield where her/his first task is to forget what (s)he had been taught before.