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This thematic issue presents a collection of six papers devoted to the adjective category which illustrates the breadth of current research interests found in the French/Belgian community of English linguistics scholars. The first article, written by Daniel Henkel (Université Paris 8), offers a quantitatively documented overview of five semantic families of adjectives (age, size, color, modality, emotion) that demonstrates that the items within each family share a distinctive syntactic profil...

Cette étude, qui a une visée à la fois descriptive, explicative, voire prédictive s’intéresse aux stéréotypes rattachés à l’anglais américain dans les ouvrages de grammaire anglaise écrits en français et qui s’adressent à des lecteurs francophones. Le corpus est constitué de quarante grammaires qui s’inscrivent dans des périodes et traditions différentes. Un examen précis des remarques sur l’anglais américain, tant sur le plan des modes de présentation des données que sur le plan linguistique, permet de déceler un certain nombre de stéréotypes dans l’espace de la tradition grammaticale. De fines nuances, sur le plan qualitatif, peuvent être toutefois détectées. La comparaison avec d’autres genres textuels (rapports du jury des concours et forums métalinguistiques sur Internet), ainsi que le recours à un questionnaire adressé à cent étudiants anglicistes révèlent que des schèmes de pensée semblables circulent dans ces discours, ce qui constitue une preuve supplémentaire de l’enracinement et de la stabilité des stéréotypes associés à la variété américaine., This study, while aiming to be descriptive, explanatory and even predictive, focuses on the stereotypes attached to American English in grammar books written in French and directed towards francophone readers. The corpus is made up of 40 grammar books from several periods and traditions. A rigorous examination of the remarks regarding American English, both in terms of the information presented as well as the linguistic aspects, makes it possible to discover a number of stereotypes in the field of grammar. However, subtle nuances on the qualitative level can also be detected. A comparison with other text genres (such as exam board reports and metalinguistic forums on the Internet), combined with feedback from a questionnaire given to 100 English language/EFL students reveals that similar thought patterns also permeate these discourses, which constitutes additional evidence regarding just how deep-rooted and stable stereotypes associated with American English are., DIversité REcherches et terrains, N° 9 | 2017

This study focuses on two productive constructions of insults in English: the vocative and the imperative. The corpus consists of the 261 episodes of an American sitcom, Married with Children (1987-1997), where innovative insults can be found in great quantity. Our main goal is to determine how readily the speaker comprehends an innovative insult. We assume that there are syntactic, semantic, morphological and phonological "hints" in the newly-formed insult which better enable the retrieval of the construction on which the new form is modelled, and which thereby facilitate comprehension. We asked informants to evaluate the degree of prototypicality of these innovative insults, outside of their context of origin, in order to determine which hints are more relevant than others and if comprehension is still possible below a quantitative threshold. Results indicate that some hints are more relevant than others and that the number of hints is not a necessary condition to decode the new insult. They also point to the insufficiency of the construction, which cannot alone convey meaning: full understanding requires recourse to context and suprasegmental factors.