The Pollyanna Principle in French: A study of variable lexis

This article investigates the different rates at which young speakers of Fr ench appear to innovate in the use of adjectives of approval and disapprova l. The principal research issues examined here are twofold: (i) the validit y of the 'Pollyanna Principle', a concept in linguistic pragmatics adapted from the 'Pollyanna Hypothesis' of psychology, and designed to account for the preference on the part of speakers for avoiding or mitigating negative terms and expressions. This hypothesis is lent support by evidence adduced by Opie and Opie (1959), that negative terms used by children and adolescen ts tend to be stable, in contrast to the more rapid turnover of terms of ap proval. (,ii) Against this however, more recent sociolinguistic research in French suggests that variation in the lexis of French has a good deal of s ocio-stylistic value compared to the pronunciation level, and perhaps also the grammar. If true, this implies that French speakers coin lexical items (both negative and positive) more frequently than speakers of English (the language upon which the Opies based their suggestion). The aim of this arti cle is therefore to examine the cross-linguistic validity of the Pollyanna principle, by analysing reported rates of lexical innovation in French. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.