Publications
Publication details [#14357]
Armstrong, Nigel and Clare Hogg. 2001. The Pollyanna Principle in French: A study of variable lexis. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (11) : 1575–1785. 
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0378-2166
Journal WWW
Annotation
Lexical innovation rates in French adjectives of approval and disapproval are analyzed in view of the crosslinguistic validity of the Pollyanna principle, which accounts for speaker preference concerning mitigation of negative expressions.