Lexical Collocations and their Acquisition in French as a Foreign Language (FLE)

Abstract

Summary The importance of stereotypical uses of language is recognized by most didactic studies of the vocabulary (Granger and Paquot, 2008). Collocations are an area of vocabulary which is difficult to master by non-native learners. This type of lexical relation often presents itself as a semi-frozen binary lexical co-occurrence. The meaning of collocations is often transparent in reception, while in production, it requires a special effort on behalf of the learner. In this paper, we have tried to verify this assertion by comparing the corpus of French language and that of learners, and to define the regularities of lexical combinations in the French interlanguage of Lithuanian learners with level B1. Thanks to the corpus at our disposal, we observed that nomino-adjectival collocations at this level are more frequent than verbal collocations. However, in the percentage of total, the number of collocations only represents a contingent part of the corpus. The corpus also reveals that the present combination of words is not always diversified either by its syntax or by its lexical content, which is sometimes atypical of standard French. Learners choose from a fairly limited number of rather free lexical units. The process of interference and hybridization can be seen as an essential contamination of collocations, both lexically and syntactically. The data received makes it possible to note that collocational competence is insufficient. The results of this study also show that the analysis of collocational constructions can reveal the relationships between competence and performance of speakers.