Deux groupes de collegiens (Abidjan et Toulouse) face à deux questions sur la transitivité et l’intransitivité en français: recherches sur les connaissances implicites et explicites des adolescents

By employing the epilinguistic and metalinguistic analysis of a corpus of responses by 170 pre-teenagers from two colleges in Abidjan and Toulouse, we will discuss, first, the concepts of acceptability, grammaticalness and utterability in order to try to determine, as far as possible, on what kind of knowledge and on what type of reasoning they rely on. Secondly, we will discuss the relationship that connects acceptability and age by showing that, contrary to what is expected, the majority of pre-teenagers that we have questioned still ground their responses more in their encyclopedic knowlege than in the formal aspects of the phrase, which is a typical feature of adolescence.