Error, arbitrariness of language and metalinguistic awareness: What relationship?

Abstract

Far from any traditional conception, this article focuses on the study of another
aspect of error. This is the revealing dimension on the one hand of the
metalinguistic activities and the introspective data of the subject, and on the other
hand of the arbitrary nature of the language. To do so, we opted for a corpus made
up of metalinguistic productions, of a group of non-native speakers, relating to
some linguistic aspects of French. The results obtained show that the error
provides information on the internalized knowledge as well as the metalinguistic
awareness of a speaker and also on the arbitrariness and the insufficiencies of
clarity, expressiveness and differentiation of the language.