Lexique-Grammaire du Français de Belgique: Les Expressions Figées

This paper presents an analysis of about 400 idiomatic expressions that belong exclusively to the regional variant of French spoken in Belgium. The model adopted is that of M. Gross's lexicon-grammars: each expression is listed as a lexical entry and classified according to its syntactic structure, in one of the classes that were proposed by M. Gross for standard French idiomatic expressions.Our research shows, on the one hand, that all the classes of standard French are represented in Belgium French and, on the other, that certain subtypes are particularly productive in Belgium while others seem to be less common than in standard French.