Abstract

This study examines non-standard lexical items in a 1930s corpus of French films. Its purpose is to investigate the evolution of such items and gauge whether they are still
part of today’s linguistic repertoire of French people. The study is based on an analysis of French dictionaries prior to and contemporary with the films which have been compared with today’s to assess the degree of acceptability of the words investigated, as well as on surveys conducted in 1999 on a sample of French speakers.

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