France is known for its strong purist tradition with regards to language, with many purists raising concerns that contact with English can lead to both lexical and syntactic borrowing, but despite these concerns, academia has paid little attention to the question of syntactic borrowing in contemporary metropolitan French until this study by McLaughlin (French, U. of California at Berkeley). The key goal of the study is to determine whether translation in the press can lead to syntactic borrowing from English to French. The issue is addressed through investigations of whether news translations contain evidence of syntactic influence, which constructions are affected by syntactic influence and how they are affected, and whether there are variables that affect the likelihood of syntactic influence. These questions are investigated through fieldwork and the linguistic analysis of a corpus. In McLaughlin's conclusion, he addresses the implication of the findings for the French language, theories of language contact in general, and translation studies as a field. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
