Department of French

Events

Polite terminology

A workshop hosted by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 27-29 April 2006

This workshop for the international participants in the project will examine the extent to which it is possible broadly to translate the linguistic terminology used in the volumes of seventeenth century observations and remarks on the French language into modern terminology and recent linguistic theories. The opacity of the grammatical terminology – coupled with the unsystematic presentation of the works – has discouraged those working on modern French language from consulting these works for information about past usage. Work will focus on building up indexes of all the terminology used in the different volumes of 'observations' and considering how its usage relates to modern practice as well as to its original socio-cultural context.