THE INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH AND PORTUGUESE ON LEXICAL ERRORS IN FRENCH
Keywords:
lexicon, L3, influence, erroR, transferAbstract
The written expression of Portuguese students in French reveals a set of lexical errors that are mostly influenced either by the mother tongue or by the first foreign language learned. The transfer of vocabulary from previous knowledge is an operation that the learner often uses to overcome existing gaps, which inevitably leads to the production of errors. Through a study of written production, the lexical errors produced from the two languages already known were, at first, identified and quantified, thus allowing us to point to a greater influence of L1 or L2. Then, after a more careful analysis, we sought to frame these errors based on some existing types of errors. Although French presents characteristics unquestionably closer to Portuguese, first because it is a Latin language and with a similar syntactic structure, something that would be the main reason for transfer by students, the results obtained with this study point to a preferential use of English. The origin of this option may be related to the significant number of words shared by the two languages or, on the other hand, a specific context in which there is a high level of contact with English culture in society, something that leads learners to involuntarily activate the English language at the moment they are forced to use the French language.
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