Sur les notions d’identité et de quantité désignées par quelques et plusieurs : une expérience empirique à partir d’un corpus d’intuitions de natifs français et d’apprenants italophones

In this study, we focus on some of the main hypotheses that object to the synonymic interpretation of quelques and plusieurs, namely: (1) quelques and plusieurs specify different quantities; (2) they denote the same quantity, but differ in that plusieurs is characterized by a positive value (oriented toward valorisation), whereas quelques is characterized by a negative value (oriented toward minimisation); (3) quelques refers to a “collective” plurality, while plusieurs determines a sum of clearly individuated and countable elements. Via a particular form of acceptability test, specifically designed for eliciting epilinguistic and metalinguistic intuitions concerning the semantics of quelques and plusieurs, we intend to: a) empirically assess which of the three hypotheses are confirmed in the implicit and explicit knowledge of a group of native speakers of French and a group of Italian-speaking learners at a B2 proficiency level; b) explore the cognitive processes that guide the two groups in their conscious and unconscious interpretation of the two adjectives. The results show that hypotheses (1) and (3) are scarcely represented in the epilinguistic and metalinguistic judgments of native speakers. Moreover, we observe that the explicit knowledge of the two adjectives relies, in most cases, on different metacognitive processes in the two groups.