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Unconventional Usage of Gender-Based Japanese Sentence-Final Particles: A Study of <i>wa</i> and <i>no</i> in Youth Conversations
oleh: Yan Wang
Format: | Article |
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Diterbitkan: | MDPI AG 2023-09-01 |
Deskripsi
Japanese society’s traditional gender norms are reflected by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in daily conversation. However, recently, Japanese young people have started to use gendered SFPs in “unclassical” ways. This study mainly examines the usage of the so-called “female” SFPs <i>wa</i> and <i>no</i> by male speakers. In total, 68 cases of <i>wa</i> (43 by male speakers and 25 by female speakers) and 84 cases of <i>no</i> (47 by male speakers and 37 by female speakers) usage were collected from casual conversations of Japanese college students in <i>TalkBank,</i> a public linguistic database. This study demonstrates that the “female” SFPs <i>wa</i> and <i>no</i> are used more frequently by male speakers than by female speakers. Different from the female speakers’ usage to soften the utterances and enhance conversational rapport, <i>wa</i> and <i>no</i> used by male speakers perform other functions. In particular, <i>wa</i> directly indexes self-centeredness, serving the speaker to express emotion, share personal ideas, or perform speech acts such as teasing or <i>amae</i> in a self-focused way, while <i>no</i> directly indexes truthfulness, which allows the speaker to share a story in a vivid tone, reconfirm the speaker’s prior statement, or provide the speaker’s explanation/reasoning in an assertive tone. This study suggests that the new, unconventional gender-based usages of SFPs reveal the social changes in gender dynamics in modern Japanese society, which should not be overlooked in language education.