ABSTRACT
This book's first research objective corresponds to the main hypothesis, namely that translation in the press can lead to syntactic borrowing from English in contemporary metropolitan French. The observed increase in frequency of the prototypical passive is widely cited as a likely contact effect because the formally equivalent construction in English is more frequent than its French counterpart. The reduction in frequency of alternative passive constructions that was also observed is only explicitly mentioned by a few commentators, such as Étiemble. The variable relating to reported speech presents a more complex picture. The results concerning the other two text-related factors are of less relevance to the current study because the interesting effects that they create in the distribution of the data are not related to syntactic influence but to features of the structures themselves. These findings can be used to address the second research objective by asking what implications they have for the future development of French.
