Le principal objectif de cette thèse est d'étudier l'incidence des erreurs prépositionnelles sur l'intelligibilité de productions en L2 anglais par des apprenants francophones. Après un résumé des caractéristiques sémantiques et morpho-syntaxiques des prépositions en anglais et en français, nous abordons les questions liées à l'acquisition d'une langue seconde en général et à l'acquisition des prépositions en particulier, afin d' identifier les facteurs qui peuvent rendre leur acquisition problématique en L2. Nous proposons également des solutions pédagogiques pour améliorer l'apprentissage des prépositions en anglais. Afin de mesurer l'intelligibilité, nous analysons un corpus de productions orales et écrites contenant des emplois erronés, répartis entre erreurs lexciales et erreurs lexico- grammaticales (additions, omissions ou substitutions). Les résultats de cette analyse permettent de voir dans quelle mesure les erreurs prépositionnelles affectent l'intelligibilité du message. / The main objective of our thesis paper is to examine the intelligibility of erroneous prepositional uses produced by French learners of English. We begin with an overview of the semantico-syntactic properties of English and French prepositions. Then we give an account of second language acquisition theories, and we highlight the acquisition of English prepositions by listing a number of reasons that are likely to make them problematic for L2 learners. We also propose certain effective pedagogical approaches to teaching English prepositions/particles. To measure intelligibility, we assess an oral and a written corpus containing L2 erroneous constructions. Our error tagset is divided into lexical and lexico-grammatical errors (addition, omission and substitution). The results of our corpus analysis allow us to observe the extent to which erroneous spatial prepositions may affect the intelligibility of the transferred message.

La tesi è divisa in tre parti: la prima parte offre un panorama delle principali teorie della valenza sviluppate in Francia e in Italia, con particolare attenzione allo statuto sintattico dei complementi preposizionali (argomenti o aggiuntivi); la seconda parte presenta lo studio contrastivo di 103 verbi francesi tratti dal "Dictionnaire de la Complémentation Verbale" di Salkoff-Valli (in preparazione); la terza parte presenta lo studio contrastivo di due gruppi preposizionali francesi di particolare interesse traduttivo: "de N" con valore di causa e "contre N". / This Thesis is divided into three parts : the first one gives an overview of the main valency theories, which have been developed in France and Italy, particularly paying attention to the problem of prepositional complements ambiguity (objects or modifiers of the verb) ; second part proposes a contrastive study of 103 French verbs, taken from Dictionnaire de la Complémentation verbale of Salkoff-Valli (in progress); third part proposes a contrastive study of two French prepositional phrases "de N" indicating a cause, and "contre N", object or specific modifier of the verb , very interesting topic under the point of view of the translation into Italian.