L’interprétation des verbes pronominaux autonomes et intensifs chez des apprenants italophones de FLE

To date, there has been no analysis of the learning strategies for the so-called pronominal verbs in French. Our study considers the interpretation of two categories of pronominal verbs, autonomous and intensive, in 30 Italian university-level L2 learners of French. To explore their awareness of pronominal verbs through a test of synonymy and acceptability we classified their interpretations at two levels of depth, based on Culioli’s (1990) distinction between ‘epilinguistic’ and ‘metalinguistic’ awareness. Spontaneous and intuitive understanding was classified as epilinguistic, while a deeper understanding, involving the justification of the previous response, was classified as metalinguistic. The results showed that: (1) the idea of a category of pronominal verbs does not seem to be relevant to these learners who rather reason in terms of sentence construction, (2) the reflexive pronoun, when alternating with zero form, is often interpreted as a mark of modality, and (3) there is no correlation between the richness of metalinguistic arguments provided by the students and the number of years of their French studies