ABSTRACT
Today France is famous, among other things, for its linguistic conservatism and acts of linguistic defence. Influence from English has become the main focus of attention for the strong French purist tradition and the reaction to it has been famously protective. The French public is also familiar with the notion that contact with English could affect French at the syntactic level. This popular perception that contact with English will lead to syntactic borrowing in French is not mirrored in the academic community. The lack of research into syntactic borrowing in French is also consistent with a general trend that accompanied the rise of the generative school in linguistics to favour internal rather than external sources of syntactic change. This book presents the first large-scale investigation of syntactic borrowing in contemporary metropolitan French. It designs a new and more thorough methodology to investigate syntactic borrowing in French.
