The inflectional behavior of English-origin adjectives in French

ABSTRACT When adjectives of English origin are pluralized in French, they follow one of three patterns: they receive inflection, reject inflection, or accept both forms. Curiously, these patterns of morphological variation have never been analyzed. This study identifies inflection-inhibiting constraints for a closed corpus of French dictionary-attested English adjectives and reveals that uninflected and variable adjectives do violate the standard native rule of adjective agreement, yet the constraints that block inflection areFrench-derived. A second feature of these adjectival anglicisms is that the nominal counterpart, if it exists, always receives native inflection (des jeans baggyvs.des baggys). The difference in word class, and specifically the feature of grammatical gender, may account for the contrastive behavior.