2.1. Semantic independence of the adjective

The most common explanation that has been given to this issue is the inherent vs. intersective theory. According to many linguists (Waugh, Reference Waugh1976; Wilmet, Reference Wilmet1986; Abeillé and Godard, Reference Abeillé and Godard1999; Langford and O’Connor, Reference Langford, O’Connor, Pusch, Kabatek and Raible2005; Rowlett, Reference Rowlett2007), adjectives that express an inherent quality of the noun will be placed pre-nominally whereas adjectives whose meaning intersects with that of the noun will be post-nominal. Waugh (Reference Waugh1976) explains that Post-N adjectives retain their full meaning and remain semantically independent whereas Pre-N adjectives do not. Examples (2) and (3) are taken from Waugh (Reference Waugh1976: 86).

In example (2), the person depicted is both a liar and furious. The noun and the adjective are understood separately from each other, they simply intersect. On the other hand, the semantic interpretation of a Pre-N adjective is not fully independent. Instead, it serves to modify the lexical meaning of the noun and it cannot be broken down into the parts of the sum, as shown in example (3).

Forsgren (Reference Forsgren1978) takes this even a step further. According to him, adjectives in Pre-N position not only lose their independence, but they also have a reduced semantic meaning and are consequently synonymous with the elementary adjectives. Thus, the Pre-N position does not allow the adjective to be semantically full and the information it carries is reduced drastically. In another article, he even goes so far as to compare adjectives in this position to function words that have very little content (Forsgren, Reference Forsgren1997).

Though this theory of intersective vs. inherent quality of the adjective makes a strong case for many adjectives, not all linguists are convinced. Spence (Reference Spence1976) highlights that there isn’t always a way to prove that the quality of the adjective is more inherent to the noun just because it is Pre-N. This distinction often relies on judgements of interpretation, which are subjective. Examples (4) and (5) are from Spence (Reference Spence1976: 46):

How can one prove that the greasiness of the shoulders is more inherent in example (4) than in example (5)? Some adjectives create a clear semantic contrast with their position in the sentence (see ancien ‘old/former’ in examples 1a and 1b), but this isn’t the case for all adjectives. The clearer the semantic distinction, the less freedom of movement the adjective has. Though anyone is free to use ancien in either position, one cannot expect the same semantic outcome. However, with examples (4) and (5), the distinction is not so clear, thus the position of the adjective is much freer.

In his study, Larsson (Reference Larsson1994), who analyzed adjective positioning in several novels, non-literary prose, newspapers, travel catalogues and tour guides, also points out the limits to the theory that Pre-N adjectives have reduced meaning. He mentions that there are some adjectives (e.g. excellent ‘excellent’) where no distinction was found between the full meaning and the reduced meaning. What is more, this analysis cannot explain why synonymous words do not behave in the same way. He mentions that immense ‘huge’ is often Pre-N and if we assume it is because its meaning is reduced to that of the elemental adjective grand ‘big’, then why are gigantesque ‘gigantic’ or géant ‘huge’ not found pre-nominally as often for the same reason (Larsson, Reference Larsson1994: 69–71)? Thus, Larsson points out that this analysis may be a tendency more than a rule.

2.2. Intension and extension of the adjective

Larsson (Reference Larsson1994: 217–218) shows that the intension and the extension of the adjective affect its position. The intension is the amount of information contained in the adjective, while the extension is the number of nouns the adjective can modify. If the intension is narrow and the semantics of an adjective is vague, its extension is wide because it can be applied to many different nouns. For example, bon ‘good’ is a very general adjective that can be applied to nearly any noun; thus, its extension is great. On the other hand, very specific adjectives, such as adjectives of nationality or shape, have a small extension because they carry a lot of information and can only modify a limited number of nouns. He concludes that adjectives of great extension have a tendency to be Pre-N, which explains why elementary adjectives are usually pre-nominal, as well as other generic adjectives such as superbe ‘great’, excellent ‘excellent’, vaste ‘vast’.

Weinrich’s (Reference Weinrich1966) theory is quite similar. He argues that Pre-N adjectives act like “morphemes” whereas Post-N adjectives act like “lexemes” (Weinrich, Reference Weinrich1966: 85). Weinrich’s definition of morphemes includes articles, demonstrative adjectives, possessive adjectives, interrogative adjectives, numeral adjectives and prepositions; whereas his definition of lexemes includes nouns, complements, relative clauses, apposition and verbal adjectives. The intension of morphemes is narrow, but their extension is wide. For example, the article le ‘the’ (definite, masculine, singular) has a very restricted meaning and carries little information. However, it can be applied to any noun whose grammatical gender is masculine. On the other hand, the intension of lexemes is larger, but their extension is smaller. For example, the word poète ‘poet’ refers to something with more semantic content than le, but it can only refer to things that are poets. This is how Weinrich views adjectives. If the adjective is placed before the noun, its interpretation is less narrow and can apply to many nouns; thus, it has become part of morphology. However, if the adjective is placed after the noun, its semantic interpretation is much fuller, and its denotation has more specifications.

2.3. Other factors

It has also been suggested that Pre-N adjectives are more subjective or abstract than Post-N adjectives (Gillaert, Reference Grillaert1976; Judge and Healey, Reference Judge and Healey1990; Grévisse, Reference Grévisse1993; L’Huillier, Reference L’Huillier1999). Larsson (Reference Larsson1994: 171) looked into some adjectives that have both a concrete and a metaphorical meaning. For example, the adjective brillant can mean both ‘bright’ (e.g. a bright light) and ‘brilliant’ (e.g. a brilliant student). Larsson found a correlation in his data between the position of the adjective and the meaning it carries: the metaphorical meaning (brilliant) was more often pre-posed to the noun and the concrete meaning (bright) was more often post-posed. That being said, he did not find the same correlation with the adjective merveilleux that can mean both ‘supernatural’ and ‘wonderful’. Though the meaning ‘supernatural’ may seem more concrete, it is not found more often in Post-N position in his data. Thus, the theory that the position of the adjective can carry specific semantics is only a tool to help comprehension, it is not categorical (Larsson, Reference Larsson1994: 206).

The idea that newness of information can affect the position of the adjective has also been mentioned by many linguists and the general consensus is that adjectives expressing new information are Post-N and adjectives referring to previously mentioned information are Pre-N (Forsgren, Reference Forsgren1978; Grévisse, Reference Grévisse1993; Larsson, Reference Larsson1994). Forsgren’s (Reference Forsgren1978: 196) corpus study shows that this is an important factor in the positioning of adjectives. He adds to this that when the noun is used with a definite article, the modifying adjective is preferred in Pre-N position. This happens because the use of the definite article usually indicates that the information carried by the noun is already known. This was not tested specifically in our own study.

Another reason that adjectives might be Pre-N or Post-N is because of prosody. According to prescriptivist manuals, shorter elements are preferred before longer elements in French (Chevalier et al., Reference Chevalier, Blanche-Benveniste, Arrivé and Peytard1964; Larsson, Reference Larsson1994; Forsgren, Reference Forsgren1997); which is a common factor influencing word order. Thus, if the noun is longer than the adjective, then the adjective is more likely to be Pre-N. This is also true for sequences of adjectives. If more than two juxtaposed Pre-N adjectives are needed, they must be placed after the noun (L’Huillier, Reference L’Huillier1999: 414). That being said, Larsson’s (Reference Larsson1994: 186–187) study shows multiple counterexamples to this theory. Thus, in practice, this aspect may not be so categorical.

Another factor that can affect adjective positioning is whether the adjective is modified by an adverb or a complement. Though sometimes, adjectives modified by an adverb can be placed pre-nominally – usually when the adverb is short – Post-N remains the preferred position in these cases. According to grammar manuals, if the adjective is modified by a complement, then it is mandatory to place the adjective after the noun. Examples (6) to (10) are taken from Chevalier et al. (Reference Chevalier, Blanche-Benveniste, Arrivé and Peytard1964: 205).

The elementary adjectives can usually stay Pre-N but only if the adverb is short:

Nevertheless, if the noun has a complement, then the adjective can optionally be Pre-N:

This seems to go in line with the prosodic constraints mentioned earlier: longer segments are Post-N. This factor is also confirmed by descriptivist studies (Forgren, Reference Forsgren1978; Larsson, Reference Larsson1994).

Many have mentioned that there can be stylistic reasons for the choice of the adjective’s position (Spence, Reference Spence1976; Grillaert, Reference Grillaert1976; Judge and Healey, Reference Judge and Healey1990; L’Huillier, Reference L’Huillier1999; Hawkins and Towell, Reference Hawkins and Towell2010). Pre-N adjectives can be used to create a more literary effect or for emphasis. However, not all situations of flexible adjective positioning can be explained by style.

2.4. Flexible adjectives

Despite all of this, it is still agreed upon by most linguists that some adjectives seem to have a flexible position with no identifiable semantic change. Larsson (Reference Larsson1994) found several instances of this. Examples (11) and (12) are from Larsson (Reference Larsson1994: 118) demonstrating minimal pairs with the same adjective modifying the same noun.

Table 1 lists adjectives that have been mentioned in the literature as being able to alternate positions without any semantic change.

Table 1. Adjectives with flexible positions

Most of these adjectives refer to positive qualities. These are the types of adjectives that Larsson (Reference Larsson1994) specifically focused on in his study because he claims that they are more subject to change than others. He left out their negative counterparts because a large part of his corpus consisted of travel catalogues and tour guides, a genre that doesn’t usually have many negative adjectives. Thus, we will be focusing on adjectives of positive value as well as adjectives of negative value in our study since our corpus is not constrained in that matter.

The current study aims at observing the behaviour of these positive and negative value adjectives and at investigating whether contact with English might cause them to be used pre-nominally more often. However, one of the main issues with making a case for variation and change due to contact is proving that the phenomenon is not simply an internal variation. If Pre-N adjectives are becoming more common in French, it could simply be a syntactic change happening independently of contact with English. Nevertheless, Thomason and Kaufman (Reference Thomason and Kaufmann1988) mention that language variation and change due to contact can often be argued if there are other structural borrowings in the same recipient language that can be attributed to the same donor language. For our purposes, this means that if French syntax has been proven to be affected by English before, it could potentially be affecting adjective positioning as well.

3.1. Language contact and French syntax

Pergnier (Reference Pergnier1989: 95) conjectures about how the English pattern that places the modifier before the element modified in compound words has been borrowed into French. Examples like libre-service ‘self-service’ or compact-disque ‘compact disc’ illustrate his point. In French morphosyntax, the main noun (service or disque) should be placed before the modifier, but these French compounds show a different pattern.

Loock (Reference Loock2013) focuses on a similar phenomenon but has different conclusions. He specifically looks at N+N phrasal structures in which the head noun is to the right (regressive order), which is typologically unusual for French, yet completely natural in English. He claims that though some may have been borrowed from English (e.g. tennis club, boat people), others have developed on their own, independently of English borrowings. He mentions examples like Star Academy (popular French reality TV show) or la grève attitude (a positive behaviour towards striking). What is more, Loock (Reference Loock2013: 263) believes that this regressive order has become a morphological innovation that is now available, and possibly even productive: brochette party ‘kebab party’, Gaz dépannage ‘emergency gas-related repairs’… Thus, this order may not be a borrowing after all. However, it is not because the structure is available to French speakers that it must be native. If enough structures with a regressive order have been borrowed from English into French, then a syntactic reanalysis could have occurred. This would lead to this structure now being used in French for innovative purposes without ever going through English lexical items. Millar (Reference Millar2007: 23) claims that this has happened with the -ing suffix. According to him, there are so many English borrowings with this suffix in the French language (e.g. parking, camping, shopping…), that -ing has been reanalyzed as a full-fledged suffix and is now used productively to create new French words, both with English bases (e.g. zapping ‘changing the channel’) and French bases (e.g. bronzing ‘tanning’). Thus, sometimes structures or morphological units can be used in a way that does not involve lexical borrowing and yet still be the product of borrowing.

What is more, the influence of English on adjective positioning in Guernésiais has been shown (Jones, Reference Jones and Jones2002). The island of Guernsey is located in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. The language spoken there is a variety of French that has been greatly influenced by English because of its proximity to England as well as its history and its political status. In traditional Guernésiais, unmarked qualifying adjectives are Pre-N (this mostly includes adjectives of colour), all others as usually Post-N. However, in modern Guernésiais, 70% of adjectives are used pre-nominally. In fact, this tendency has become so strong, that even compound adjectives and superlative structures are found Pre-N (longer, heavier sequences are usually not pre-nominal in Guernésiais) (Jones, Reference Jones and Jones2002: 154). Thus, if this can happen in one variety of French, it could be happening in other varieties as well. The author does not exclude the possibility that this could be due to multiple causations. Pre-N has always existed in Guernésiais, even if it is supposed to only be used in restricted contexts. Therefore, the linguistic system could be trying to converge both patterns into one word order through a process of simplification. Since the Adjective + Noun order is the pattern used in English, it could be a factor that is helping the Pre-N word order win out.

This concept was also brought up by Heine (Reference Heine, Siemund and Kintana2008: 38); he calls it narrowing. Narrowing may happen when the recipient language has multiple options for the same linguistic feature, but the donor language only has one. The redundancy of the two patterns in the recipient language is narrowed down to only one option, usually the same one as the donor language. Though the narrowing of adjective positioning in French has not yet been proven, it is possible to hypothesize that this could be happening in French. Some adjectives have two possible positions without any meaning change, but Pre-N is the unmarked option in English. Therefore, French could be trying to model the English pattern because of contact. Though it is true that Post-N adjectives do exist in English, they have a more restricted reading than their Pre-N counterparts. Used pre-nominally, adjectives in English can convey anything a Post-N adjective can, but the opposite isn’t true (Cinque, Reference Cinque2010: 23–24). Examples (13) and (14) are from Cinque (Reference Cinque2010: 18):

Example (14) is in fact a reduced relative clause: Mary interviewed every candidate that is possible for her to interview. However, (13) is ambiguous. Though it can have the same reading as (14), it can also be synonymous with potential in this context. Thus, in English, Pre-N adjectives appear in more contexts and are therefore more likely to be used as a pattern to model. McLaughlin (Reference McLaughlin, Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers2018) mentions that the closer the variant is to its counterpart in the other language, the more likely it is to be influenced by contact. The case of adjective positioning involves two very similar patterns; consequently, contact could possibly be at play.

The influence of English in Quebec French and the other varieties of French in Canada has also been studied extensively. Because of the proximity of these French-speaking communities to English speaking areas (in Canada and in the US) and because of a strong bilingual presence, these varieties have often been said to be influenced by English. The use of the future tense is one example. The French language has different ways of expressing the future: the present tense, the periphrastic future (aller ‘to go’ + infinitive of a verb) or the synthetic future (verb stem + future ending). The periphrastic future is typologically closer to the English pattern will + verb than the synthetic future. Though the synthetic future is disappearing from all varieties of French, studies that have compared variants of French that are geographically close to English-speaking communities to variants of French that are more distant have found some interesting results. Tremblay et al. (Reference Tremblay, Blondeau and Labeau2019: 85) have shown that Quebec French speakers use the periphrastic future more frequently than Belgian French speakers while Grimm and Nadasdi (Reference Grimm and Nadasdi2011: 174) have confirmed that Ontario French uses the periphrastic future more often than Quebec French or Hexagonal French. The latter study has also come to the conclusion that the more participants spoke English, the more likely they were to use the periphrastic future while speaking French (Grimm and Nadasdi, Reference Grimm and Nadasdi2011: 185). However, Poplack and Turpin (Reference Poplack and Turpin1999: 158) in their study, found no correlation between the choice of future tense in French and the participants’ proficiency in English.

The large number of bilingual speakers in Canada has also led linguists to study the language development of children who were raised speaking both French and English. Nicoladis (Reference Nicoladis2006) has investigated the cross-linguistic transfer of syntactic patterns in bilingual children in Alberta, Canada. She compared the adjectival use of children who spoke both languages to that of children who only spoke English. She found that bilingual children reversed Post-N adjectives more often than monolingual children, placing them Pre-N to match the English pattern. This proves her theory that linguistic influence can happen during the developmental stages of children who speak more than one language.

Making a claim for language contact to be the cause of variation and change is always difficult. Nevertheless, it remains possible that the syntax of French has been affected by English in different ways. According to Matras and Sakel (Reference Matras and Sakel2007), replication of patterns (PAT) from one language to another – as opposed to replication of matter (MAT) – is more subtle and less likely to be fought against by the general population, or even by prescriptivism. Therefore, though linguistic purism is usually quite strong in France, this sort of syntactic borrowing could more easily have made its way into the language than any lexical borrowing. If this is happening to the adjectival pattern of French, and English is the cause, it could be coming from media translations. In France and around Europe, American produced media is a very popular platform. In 2010, 75% of the best rated shows in Europe were from the United States (Biermé, Reference Biermé2018). This means that many people are consuming this media and, if it can be shown that translated media is in fact displaying a different adjectival pattern than native media, then it might be hypothesized that people are hearing this pattern as they watch the shows and movies and could be absorbing it and possibly reusing it.

3.2. The influence of translation

Translated texts have been known to be vectors of cross-linguistic influence. It can remain limited to translated texts, but it can also spread to native written corpora (Danchev, Reference Danchev and Fisiak1984; Baumgarten and Özçentin, Reference Baumgarten, Ozçetin, Siemund and Kintana2008; Kranich et al., Reference Kranich, Becher and Höder2011). Sometimes, linguistic structures from the source language are translated into the target language with structures that are close to the original even if they are marginal. These structures are grammatical but less frequent. This can lead to the marginalized features becoming more prominent and even becoming the norm (Baumgarten and Özçentin, Reference Baumgarten, Ozçetin, Siemund and Kintana2008: 294). Thus, the new pattern starts to become normal for native speakers. In some cases, the new pattern introduced by translations is simply a stylistic innovation that is only used in certain contexts or certain registers. Kranich et al. (Reference Kranich, Becher and Höder2011: 11) mentions this to be the case in legal documents for example. What is more, syntactic transfer can be less salient than other types of transfer, such as lexical or even morphological transfer (Danchev, Reference Danchev and Fisiak1984: 49). This means that syntactic borrowings may be more likely to go beyond the realm of translation and make their way into native speakers’ speech.

English texts translated into German have been studied from a diachronic perspective in order to see if there was any change over time. The results show that not only is the syntax in German translated texts influenced by English, but also that, over time, native German texts have been influenced by the same features (Kranich et al., Reference Kranich, Becher and Höder2011: 34). For example, the use of sentence-initial but to create a dialogical effect. Starting a sentence with aber ‘but’ is not typical in German but has seen a rise over time (Baumgarten and Özçentin, Reference Baumgarten, Ozçetin, Siemund and Kintana2008: 295).

In the introduction, we mentioned Schöntag (Reference Schöntag2009) and McLaughlin’s (Reference McLaughlin2011) studies on adjective positioning in French. Schöntag (Reference Schöntag2009) studied a small corpus of two magazines, two translated novels, two newspapers, one scientific report and a collection of oral texts. He analyzed the position of adjectives in all of these texts to see if genre or translation affected their positioning. His study did not yield any positive results. First, he did not find an unusually high rate of Pre-N adjectives and second, he could not prove that the Pre-N adjectives were, in fact, caused by contact with English.

McLaughlin (Reference McLaughlin2011) wanted to test the influence of English on the positioning of adjectives in French in translations of news articles. Her results show that only 13% of the tokens were preposed, which is below the average of Pre-N adjectives in French (according to the McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin2011: 44, the average is 35%). In fact, she even noticed a negative effect of English on the positioning of adjectives in the French translations. In her data, there were more Pre-N structures in French when the original English structure did not contain an Adjective + Noun sequence. If that sequence was present in English, the translations almost always used the unmarked French structure Noun + Adjective. This indicates that the translators were aware of the structural difference between French and English and they consciously reversed it (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2011: 42–43). She thus concludes that English does not influence the positioning of adjectives in French in her corpus. However, she did observe that there is a correlation between the speed of translation and the frequency of preposed adjectives: the faster the text was translated, the more Pre-N adjectives were used in the translation (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2011: 48). This is due to there being less conscious attention to cross-linguistic differences, thus the translators use word orders that may be more intuitive regardless of prescriptivism. Media translation is a fast-moving world, and clients are requesting translations to be completed with tighter deadlines than ever before (CNC, 2021). Thus, it is possible to imagine that faster translations might be affecting the positioning of adjectives in this type of corpus. Finally, McLaughlin also noticed that the tokens were more likely to be preposed when they were used in translations of reported speech, which she posits is because there is “less narratorial control” (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2011: 50). This is relevant to our study because TV shows and movies are meant to imitate oral speech, thus somewhat escaping the prescriptivist rules and the style constraints of written corpora.

Even though her study on adjectives did not yield any positive results, McLaughlin also analyzed two other syntactic features in the same type of corpus. The first was the use of passive structures (she also mentions this in an earlier article, McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2010). In French, the passive is not commonly used, and alternative structures are usually preferred. However, in English the passive is quite common, especially in news headlines. McLaughlin found that the rate of passive forms rose in the French translations she studied while the use of the alternative structures decreased (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2011: 72). She even noticed that this happened in situations where the original English sentence did not have a passive structure (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2010: 1934). She concluded that English was influencing the use of the passive in French in her corpus. The second feature she analyzed in her 2011 study was the verbal -ant forms. Adding this suffix to a French verbal root can create a present participle or a gérondif (a verbal form that expresses simultaneous actions). Though this can be related to the verbal -ing in English, the French uses are not as common as the English ones. However, contact with English has been cited before as reasons for the expansion of the progressive construction in both Italian and Spanish (see Durante, Reference Durante1981 and Poutain, Reference Poutain, Parry, Davies and Temple1994). McLaughlin’s results show that the distribution of the two verbal -ant forms has been altered by influence from English. Though the gérondif is a more commonly used structure in Modern French than the present participle, the translated texts showed that 83% of the -ant forms were present participles, whereas only 17% were gérondif (McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2010: 83). Thus, her study shows that translated texts are subject to being influenced by the source language.

3.3. Audio-visual medium

Standardization is also an important factor in the process of translation influence. If the target language is highly standardized, it might be more inclined to resist the transfer. Though Benzitoun (Reference Benzitoun2014) did not work on translated works, he did study adjective positioning in French in oral corpora. He found that many adjectives that are more often Post-N in written corpora were used pre-nominally in his oral corpus (Benzitoun, Reference Benzitoun2014: 2339). This shows that the medium that is under investigation can have an effect on syntax. We infer that written and formal corpora are less likely to show innovative forms than oral and informal corpora.

The audiovisual corpus that we have chosen to analyze is interesting because it is meant to imitate natural, oral speech, but the dialogue used in the shows and movies comes from a written script. In one of his articles, Barra (Reference Barra2013) gives a detailed, step-by-step review of the translating and dubbing process of a TV show. He mentions several times that fidelity to the original script is very important, along with making the show culturally accessible to a foreign audience, adapting it all to fit the technical constraints of the medium while still “keeping the characters and their way of speaking realistic and natural in the target language” (Barra, 203: 106). Thus, an effort is made to maintain the orality of the genre (assuming that is the style conveyed in the original show). Barra also mentions that, though the translators are the first people to work on the show – they work with both the script and the visual content – the adaptor (who is not a translator) often rewrites the scripts to fit the technical specifications of the medium. Finally, the dubbing director still has the right to make minor modifications during the recording sessions (adjective uses are listed as a modification they may make). Thus, the final product is often far from the first draft offered by the translating professionals. What is more, adherence to the prescriptive rules of the target language is never mentioned in Barra’s article. Not only are the professionals involved in this process faced with too many constraints (time, financial, cultural, technical…) for this to be a priority, but also, the script is modified by many different people who may not all be aware of prescriptive linguistic features. Yet all of them have access to the original version at some point in the process, which could lead to it influencing the choices they make in the translations.

This leads us to hypothesize that Pre-N adjectives could be used more often in translated media. Since French is a highly standardized language, it is unlikely that this change is happening to the same degree in all genres and in all contexts, but it is most likely happening in contexts of lower prestige. Thus, the media might be a good place to see this change in progress. In the same way that standardization affects linguistic transfer from translated texts, genre and register also play a role. Genres that are less standard and less prestigious can more easily be influenced by translations (Kranich et al., Reference Kranich, Becher and Höder2011: 28). Though it has been mentioned that lexical anglicisms are often spread to the general population via the media (Etiemble, Reference Etiemble1964: 186; Pergnier, Reference Pergnier1989: 146), this platform is still an understudied language context when it comes to language change and language contact. It was long believed that the media cannot affect the speech of viewers because there is no interaction involved, but this view is now challenged. It has been found that passive watching isn’t enough, motivation for the consumption of TV shows or movies as well as engagement with the characters and the story are essential to the development of language change; however, the change is still there (Androutsopoulos, Reference Androutsopoulos2014: 16; Stuart-Smith et al., Reference Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins and Gunter2013: 502). Androutsopoulos (Reference Androutsopoulos2014: 16) also mentions that portraying stigmatized variants on TV has been known to prompt speakers of those variants to change their linguistic behaviours to be closer to the standard. Tagliamonte and Roberts (Reference Tagliamonte and Roberts2005) studied the use of intensifiers in the popular American TV show Friends. They observed that the uses of so (vs. really or very) over the years correlates with its uses in the US by the general population (Tagliamonte and Roberts, Reference Tagliamonte and Roberts2005: 296). Thus, the TV show correlates with what was happening linguistically in real life. However, the reverse seems to be true as well. Stuart-Smith et al. (Reference Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins and Gunter2013) analyzed TH-fronting and L-vocalization in Scottish vernacular of Glasgow. Though these features are not usually found in this dialect, they are present in London English, which led them to wonder if people in Glasgow who watched TV shows originating from London were more inclined to use these features than others. Their results show that the younger participants were using these features more than the adults and they found that engagement with TV shows was the second strongest contributing factor in this trend (Stuart-Smith et al., Reference Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins and Gunter2013: 528). Thus, there is evidence that linguistic change due to media consumption is possible.

What is more, American TV shows are often translated fast because episodes come out regularly and must be aired quickly (Barra, Reference Barra2013; CNC, 2021). As mentioned earlier, McLaughlin (Reference McLaughlin2011) found that the faster a text was translated, the more Pre-N adjectives were used in the translation. Therefore, we can reasonably speculate that translated American TV shows might demonstrate a higher rate of Pre-N adjectives than native French shows.

4.1. The corpus

We started by analyzing the first ten episodes of the first season of four American TV shows dubbed in French and four native French TV shows. We have also read the scripts of the first 12 episodes of the first season of one extra American show dubbed in French. The reason for this is that two of the selected American shows have episodes that only run for 20 minutes each whereas all the French shows run for at least 45 minutes. A shorter running time means there are less opportunities to collect adjectives, thus we have decided to add one more translated show to even out that gap. Though this study was not meant to be diachronic, an effort was made to select shows ranging from the late 1990s to the present day for both types of shows. We also took care to pick genres that would be conducive to much dialogue in order to ensure greater opportunities for adjectives to be used (comedies and romantic comedies). Tables 2 and 3 present a list of these shows, the years they first aired and the name of the companies that translated the American shows into French.

Table 2. List of American shows in our corpus

Table 3. List of French shows in our corpus

For big budget movies, most dubbing professionals adapt the translation of visual media so the translated dialogue fits with the lip movement of the actors. Though this can be the case for TV shows, it is the author’s opinion as a native speaker of both French and English, that the lip movements of the actors were not taken into account during the translation of these specific shows, thus, only the content was conveyed via the translation.

In addition to these shows, a few French movies were analyzed as well. Though TV shows are particularly interesting to analyze because they usually expand over time, and their translation is sometimes rushed to meet their scheduled airing time, movies can also be of interest because their longer running time offers more opportunities for adjectives to be used. In an attempt to bring additional data to our study, we have collected the adjectives from 19 scripts of native French movies on a website called Lecteurs Anonymes (Reference Anonymesn.a.) (http://lecteursanonymes.org/scenario/).