This PhD presents a study in linguistics and psycholinguistics that uses a functionalist approach to the study of production of non-conventional verbs by adults learning in French as a Second Language. We are interested in oral productions like to break a fruit that are known as metaphors or errors of over-extension. Duvignau called these semantic approximations because of the proximity between the non-conventional verb that participants produced and the conventional verb that should have been produced. The objective of this PhD is to investigate production of semantic approximations at different levels in French Second Language learning. We suggest that the palliative strategy could be responsible for the production of semantic approximations by learners in Second Language and helps learners to communicate with few verbs. We hypothesized that the more advanced learners will use less semantic approximations. We used the “Approx” protocol (Duvignau and Gaume, 2004) that contains 17 video-actions to measure production of verbs in denomination and reformulation tasks in 125 participants at different levels in French (a Chinese group (N=56), a foreign non-Chinese group speaking 27 different languages (N=56) and French group (N=13)) from different schools or companies in France. This research shows that our hypothesis that the more advanced learners will use less semantic approximation receives limited support.
