Because Attitudes Are Social Affects, They Can Be False Friends...

Abstract

The attitudes of the speaker during a verbal interaction are affects built by language and culture. Since they are a sophisticated material for expressing complex affects, using a channel of control that is surely not confused with emotions, they are the larger part of the affects expressed during an interaction, as it could be shown on large databases by Campbell [3]. strong Twelve representative attitudes of Japanese are given to be listened both by Japanese native speaker and French native speaker naive in Japanese. They include “doubt-incredulity”, “evidence”, “exclamation of surprise”, “authority”, “irritation”, “admiration”, “declaration”, “interrogation”, and four socially referenced degrees of politeness: “simple politeness”, “sincerity-politeness”, “kyoshuku” and “arrogance-impoliteness” (Sadanobu [11]). Two perception experiments using a closed forced choice were carried out, each attitude being introduced by a definition and some examples of real situations. The 15 native Japanese subjects discriminate all the attitudes over chance, with some little confusion inside the politeness class. French subjects do not process the concept of degree of politeness: they do not identify the typical Japanese politeness degrees. The prosody of “kyoshuku”, highest degree of politeness in Japanese, is misunderstood by French on contrary meaning as “impoliteness”, “authority” and “irritation”.