Interpreting verb definitions proposed by primary school pupils: Ways to say generic, particular, and “hard to say”
This article aims to show how Frédéric François’ work presents a relevant theoretical framework for studying the definitions of the verb produced by elementary school pupils. Attentive to the different ways of putting semantic equivalences into words, he reveals stable, functional discursive choices when it comes to defining lexical words but problematic grammatical classifications that need to be interpreted. The dialogical perspective in which he approaches students justifications, as open to different modalities of interpretation, offers an alternative to a normative reading of school productions. In our corpus of 93 definitions, the alignment of responses according to a dominant matrix – a verb is an action – allowed us to reveal “events” (in the sense of Frédéric François) which translate the predicative function of the verb and its capacity to signify time.