La verbalisation du calcul interprétatif et de l'incertitude en français et en anglais : approche comparative et interculturelle

This study on linguistic markers of inference takes place within a larger project entitled "From perception to oral production", the goal of which is to identify the links between comprehension and production processes, in particular the sources of difficulty for French learners of English. This study is related to the article published by Poussard, Vincent-Durroux and David in this same volume, but is based on a wider set of data : two further comparable corpora were added, one between French native speakers and the other between English native speakers . The semi-structured interviews revolve around the same sequence from the same English language film, dubbed into French for the French native speakers. The article first compares the markers of inference showing the linguistic competence of speakers in their native language. It also explores the pragmatic dimension of expressing uncertainty, an inherent part of expressing inference, as well as the degree of modalisation used in the two L1 corpora. Secondly, using the English native speakers as a model, the study examines the L2 interlanguage of the French students to assess where the gaps are in their performance in English. It shows that these gaps cannot be explained only in terms of inadequate lexical or grammatical knowledge, but are often classical cases of cross-cultural pragmatic failure. A number of representative examples from the three corpora (French/French, English/English and English/French learners of English) are presented by way of illustration