Comment les attitudes prosodiques sont parfois de « faux-amis » : les affects sociaux du japonais vs. français
Takaaki Shochi, Véronique Aubergé, Albert Rilliard.

The attitudes of the speaker during a verbal interaction are affects linked to the speaker’s intentions, and are built by the language and the culture. Attitudes are the main part of the affects expressed during everyday interactions. This paper describes several experiments underlying that some attitudes belong both to Japanese and French languages, and are implemented in perceptively similar prosodies, but that some Japanese attitudes don’t exist and/or are wrongly decoded by French listeners. Results are presented for the 12 attitudes and three levels of language learning (naive, beginner, intermediary). It has to be noted that French listeners, naive in Japanese, can very well recognize admiration, authority and irritation; that they don’t discriminate Japanese question from declaration before the intermediary level, and that the extreme Japanese politeness is interpreted as impoliteness by French listeners, even when they can speak a good level of Japanese.