Les unités phraséologiques : un phénomène linguistique complexe? Séquences (semi-)figées construites avec les verbes "prendre" et "donner" en français écrit L1 et L2 : Approche descriptive et acquisitionnelle

It is now generally accepted that phraseological units are an area of great difficulty in foreign language acquisition, even for advanced learners (Howarth, 1998; Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Nesselhauf, 2005; Forsberg, 2006). Accordingly, we analyzed 906 verb-noun combinations – including 703 phraseological units – with two high-frequency verbs, namely "prendre" (ex.: "prendre position") and "donner" (ex.: "donner à X Dét occasion de N"), taken from a corpus of academic texts produced by advanced learners of French as a foreign language (L2), and from a control corpus of academic texts produced by native speakers of French (L1). The aim of the study was mainly descriptive: we tried to reach a definition of the phraseological competence of the advanced variety of academic French as an L2, and to compare two different groups of advanced learners, i.e. English-speaking learners (185.000 words) and Dutch-speaking learners (90.000 words). First, to establish the phraseological or free status of these 906 verb-noun combinations, we made use of four lexical databases that were available for French as an L1: a lexical database studying predicates and arguments in the way they co-occur in journalistic texts (Fabre & Bourigault, 2006), a list of verbal phraseological units (M. Gross, 1975, 1988), a corpus of written press, and a corpus of spoken French (Francard et al., 2002). The method of analysis that we adopted in this study combines two complementary approaches in the field of phraseology: (i) the functional approach, which depends on linguistic criteria of fixedness (syntax, semantics, lexis); (ii) the statistical approach, which depends on measures of lexical attraction in corpus linguistics (e.a. the mutual information score). Secondly, this analysis allowed us to quantify several external (mother tongue, text type, spoken/written language), and internal factors (structure of the noun phrase, semantic categories) which are likely to influence the acquisition of (erroneous or error-free) phraseological units with high-frequency verbs. Overall results in academic texts showed a significant contrast in the frequency of verb-noun phraseological units with "prendre" and "donner": advanced learners of French as an L2 underuse phraseological units with 'prendre' (ex.: "prendre Dét exemple de N") but overuse phraseological units with "donner" (ex. "donner Dét instruction"). In addition to this collocational analysis, an error analysis on phraseological units allowed us to categorize errors according to: (i) the error type, which can be defined as a formal (ex. : "donner l’incentif"), contextual (ex. : "prendre place" instead of "avoir lieu") or quantitative type of deviation (ex. : "donner Dét trait à X" instead of "prêter Dét trait à X") ; (ii) the grammatical category, which concerns the place of the deviation (verb + noun, verb, noun, determiner, and modifier) ; (iii) the degree of error gravity, which was defined here according to the error type, the grammatical category of error, the number of deviations per phraseological unit, the frequency and the collocability of the phraseological unit concerned in L1 French. Thirdly, we investigated 503 phraseological units taken from strictly argumentative essays produced by learners of French as an L2, from the angle of accuracy and complexity, in order to shed some light on the phraseological proficiency level of advanced English-speaking vs Dutch-speaking learners of French. This thesis is rounded off by a conclusion in which a few explanatory and didactic perspectives are suggested, in keeping with the findings of this essentially descriptive study.