Our study deals with two elements involved in the acquisition of Polish as a first language and of French as a foreign language.The first element is verbal acquisition. We observe that, when acquiring the verbal lexicon of a first and foreign language, learners use a large number of generic verbs such as to cut, to do, to break. These verbs may be used in non conventional statements.The second element is non conventional statements based on verbs, such as: “she is breaking a tomato”. These statements are considered as errors, over-extensions or metaphors. But we assert that these statements reflect a semantic flexibility which is essential to the acquisition of the lexicon when learning a first and second language. This also applies to the verbal lexicon, which we believe is organized through semantic proximity. This is in agreement with several other authors’ works.Our subjects are Polish adults and children. The children may be in the early or late stages of language acquisition. All are learning French.They were subjected to an experimental protocol which consisted in two tasks: action denomination and action reformulation. Our results include both semantic and statistical analysis. They reveal that all types of subjects produce a large number of generic verbs and non conventional statements.
Semantic structuring of verbal lexicon in Polish and French as a foreign language