| Abstract |
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It is now generally accepted that phraseological units are an area of great difficulty in second language acquisition, even for advanced learners (Nesselhauf 2004, 2005). Can one nevertheless assume that learners acquire such a thing as "phraseological" competence ? To answer this question, we analyzed 589 verb-noun (semi) fixed combinations with two high frequency verbs, namely "prendre" and "donner", taken from a corpus of argumentative texts (190.000 words) produced by advanced English learners of French as a second language and by French native speakers (180.000 words). In addition to carrying out a contrastive interlanguage analysis of our learner data (Granger 1998, 2004), we also used a parametric and statistical method of data treatment as described in Degand & Bestgen (2004). This combined method of analysis has allowed us to quantify several internal and external parameters which are likely to influence the acquisition of phraseological units. |
