ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns three features of adjective use in French: the preposing of the adjective, the accumulation of adjectives and the adverbial use of adjectives. The question of English influence on adjective position has been raised concerning other Romance languages but, as is the case for French, there has been almost no in-depth scholarly research. The lack of research into the question of the effect of contact on adjective position in the other Romance languages means that there is no strong evidence here either to support or to reject the hypothesis that is being tested for French. The chapter determines whether the corpus contains evidence of preposing that can be attributed to influence from the original English dispatch. Three hypotheses were used to test for the presence of syntactic influence affecting adjective position and two main findings emerged. The chapter shows that both speed of translation and the presence of reported speech affect the rate with which adjectives are preposed.
