Étude contrastive sur l’emploi à valeur d’inférence auditive : les verbes d’audition involontaire entendre et kikoeru en français et en japonais contemporains

Abstract

Issue: The verb entendre in French denotes comprehension but can also represent comprehension embodied through auditory perception. This usage, referred to as auditory inference, is generally associated with simulation, a form of fictivity, and parallels a specific construction in Japanese where the verb of involuntary audition kikoeru is combined with a grammatical element expressing metaphorical comparison (e.g., yōni, mitaini). Objectives: This study aims to highlight, through a comparison between French and Japanese, a novel characteristic of perceptual inference: namely, that the verbs entendre in French and kikoeru in Japanese do not directly express perceptual inference, but rather do so within constructions incorporating specific linguistic markers. Method: The analysis draws on the corpus Frantext (17,836 occurrences of the verb entendre) for French and the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (500 out of 9,151 tokens of the verb kikoeru) for Japanese. Two analytical methods were applied: multidimensional scaling was performed using the statistical software KH Coder 3, while manual analysis characterized the uses of involuntary audition and auditory comprehension. Results: Auditory inference is more frequent with the verb kikoeru in Japanese than with entendre in French. However, in French, subordinate clauses introduced by the conjunctive construction comme si tend to be used more frequently to express auditory inference compared to those introduced by que. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that, despite the higher frequency of auditory inference with kikoeru in Japanese, similarities exist with entendre in French, particularly through subordinate clauses introduced by comme si. These findings suggest a shared cognitive mechanism between the two languages for the expression of perceptual inference, contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between perception, simulation, and linguistic constructions from a contrastive perspective.