A research proposal

Two aspects of Japanese sentence-final expressions in relation to gender:

expressing modality and constructing stereotypes

Summary and purpose of the research

Japanese is known to exhibit different speech styles between women and men, which is most
apparent in the choice of sentence-ending form. This form can indicate the gender of the
speaker as well as the attitude of the speaker (Ide, 1998). It is believed that male ending
choices are often perceived as sounding vulgar and enforcing solidarity; therefore, women are
not expected to use these forms. On the other hand, female ending choices are polite, indirect,
less assertive, and soft sounding. According to Inverness (1999) these features, especially the
lack of assertiveness, encourage the addressees who are participating in the conversation,
allowing the conversation to be carried out cooperatively.

As some of these ending forms strongly suggest femininity or masculinity, they are often
used to depict stereotypical women and men. These endings are found in all manner of
scripted conversations as well as very casual conversation styles writing, such as novels, film
scripts, advertisements and magazine articles (Flunge & Gubaru, 2002). Flunge & Gubaru
argued that in those written conversations, women are consistently enforcing their femininity
and men their masculinity with the ending forms. However, according to Shigeko (2004),
gender-related forms are not used as frequently in actual conversation as they are seen in
written texts and some are even disappearing. Moreover, cross-gender usage has been
observed (Shigeko, 2004).

This project will investigate the current usage of the gender-related forms by young
Japanese women and men, in particular, the function, frequency and circumstance of
occurrence of each ending form. Differences between actual language use and the speech
style in a planned (scripted) conversation will be discussed, including the style employed
when quoting others. Then these conversation styles will be compared to determine the
gender identity in Japanese culture presented by the different speech styles.

The purpose of the research is to clarify the function of gender-related sentence final
expressions, including sentence final particles (SFPs), copulas and morphemes attached to
verbs. Instead of describing only the normative use of these expressions, the proposed study
intends to observe how they are actually used by whom and in which context. Then the study
will discuss how these expressions are used to construct stereotypes of women and men.

Relevant background literature (initial literature review)

With the general growth of feminist work in many academic fields, it is hardly surprising that
the relationship between language and gender has attracted considerable attention in recent
years. While some research has focused only on the description of differences, other work has
sought to show how linguistic differences both reflect and reproduce social difference.
Accordingly, Coates (1988) suggests that research on language and gender can be divided
into studies that focus on dominance and those that focus on difference.
Much of the earlier work emphasized dominance. Lakoff's (1975) pioneering work suggested
that women's speech typically displayed a range of features, such as tag questions, which
marked it as inferior and weak. Thus, she argued that the type of subordinate speech learned
by a young girl "will later be an excuse others use to keep her in a demeaning position, to
refuse to treat her seriously as a human being" (1975, p.5). While there are clearly some
problems with Lakoff's work - her analysis was not based on empirical research, for example,
and the automatic equation of subordinate with `weak' is problematic - the emphasis on
dominance has understandably remained at the center of much of this work. Other research
has shown how men nominated topics more, interrupted more often, held the floor for longer,
and so on (Zimmerman & West, 1975). The chief focus of this approach, then, has been to
show how patterns of interaction between men and women reflect the dominant position of
men in society.

Some studies, however, have taken a different approach by looking not so much at power in
mixed-sex interactions as at how same-sex groups produce certain types of interaction. In a
typical study of this type, Maltz and Borker (1982) developed lists of what they described as
men's and women's features of language. They argued that these norms of interaction were
acquired in same-sex groups rather than mixed-sex groups and that the issue is therefore one
of (sub-)cultural miscommunication rather than social inequality. Much of this research has
focused on comparisons between, for example, the competitive conversational style of men
and the cooperative conversational style of women.

Japanese women's language attracted people's attention when Jugaku published

Onna to Nihongo (Women and Japanese) in 1979. Since then, similar to the development of
research on women's language in English and other languages has centered on two main
theories both a 'dominance' approach has been taken.

The 'Dominance' approach has been most obvious in Akiba-Reynolds' (1991) work. She
claims that the difference between women's and men's language today reflects the Japanese
society of the feudal era in which women were viewed as second-class citizens. She argued
that although the social structure has changed, the culture which considers that women should
be submissive and should talk accordingly has not changed. For example, Abe (1990)
discovered that women's greetings are regarded as less polite when a man and a woman use
the same greeting at work. In other words, women are still expected to be more polite than
men. According Kawasaki (1998), women's lower status and men's dominance in society are
responsible for the different language use. As the younger and the inferior are not allowed to
talk in an assertive manner to their counterparts, women are not allowed to talk assertively.

Ide (1982, 1991) has focused on the difference' approach and argues that language difference
between men and women comes from gender role difference rather than the result of men's
dominance. Her interpretation is that women tend to spend more time on socializing with other
women, which requires polite forms, while men spend more time at work where they need an
efficient language. She also claims that women use women's language in order to keep their
identity. Not only polite expressions but women's language in general functions to create an
identity as an woman. Ide's (1991) position is that women are labelling themselves as women
by choosing this feminine language.

Other research has focused the specific aspects of Japanese language that create a sense of
gender (Ide 1991; McGloin 1991). Some of this work has looked specifically at the differing
sentence-final particles (SFP) used by males or females. This research can generally be
divided based on two main methods that have been used. One method has attempted to clarify
the function of SFPs and the reasons why women can use a certain set of particles, and men
cannot, and vice versa. McGloin (1991) asserted that particles used by men are assertive and
imply that the speaker takes full responsibility for the statement. On the other hand, particles
used by women are seen as a tool to avoid being assertive (McGloin 1991). Cook (1991)
investigated SFPs in social settings and found that they were used to create cooperation
between the participants in the conversation by indicating gender roles and identities.

Another approach has been to observe the frequency of these particles in real conversation.
Researchers engaged in this task record conversations of several people and count how many
particles are used. Okamoto (1995) showed that particles strongly suggesting femininity are
becoming less and less popular and that even some particles suggesting masculinity are being
used by women.

The aim of this current project is to add to the literature by investigating the functions and
frequency of Japanese sentence-final particles and the way they contribute to marking the
gender of a speaker. To do so, it will look in particular at how, why, and the extent to which
women use or do not use sentence final particles in both scripted and natural conversations.

Research questions

The research aims to establish whether there is a distinction between the actual use of gender
specific SFPs in the real male and female speech and that in stereotypical or scripted male
and female speech. To do so, it will analyze the functions of these particles and their role in the
stereotypical image of women or men and their role in real language use. It will, therefore,
seek to answer the following questions:

1. Why are particular sentence final expressions associated with gender? What are their
functions?
2. When and how are these sentence final expressions actually used? What are the
effects of these expressions?
3. Is there any agreement among Japanese speakers on the stereotypical use of these
gender-related sentence-final expressions?
4. Is there any difference between the actual use of these sentence-final expressions and
the stereotypical use of them?

Research methods

The study will take a mixed-methods approach and collect and analyze data from three main
sources. The first source will be an extensive review of the literature to investigate Japanese
people's overt views towards women's language. This will include the way SFPs are
associated with stereotypical gender identifies. The second source will be conversations that
appear in fiction, film scripts, and drama scripts. These will be analyzed to investigate how
gender differences are created in the popular media. The particular focus will be on both the
frequency (quantitative) of sentence-final particles (SFP) and the function of each. There will
also be a focus on whether women do actually use certain SFPs, and it will also attempt to
account for the reasons why both women and men on these scripts are using any SFP found
in the written scripts (qualitative).

The third and largest source of data will be natural conversations. The conversations will be
recorded in Japan, mainly in the Tokyo area, in order to focus on language use in standard
Japanese. As the interest of the study is in the current use of SFP, not traditional
or innovative use, the subjects will be aged between 20 and 40. Again the analysis will count
the frequency (quantitative) of sentence-final particles (SFP) and analyze the function of each.
Again the focus is on the number of SFPs used by women and the reasons why they use
them. The overall aim is to see how SFPs in contemporary Japanese conversation create or
challenge stereotypical gender roles.

Anticipated problems and limitations

There are many variations in both oral and written forms of Japanese language according to
the region, generation, education and so on. Since it is not realistic to cover all variations,
this study is limited to the language use of working women and men in Tokyo, whose age is
between 20 and 40. This is because members of this demographic may feel less bound by
traditional linguistic norms. However, other variables such as occupation, position at work, and
family background may affect the data.

Ethical considerations

As recordings of natural conversations will be involved, informed consent needs to be

obtained. Both oral and written explanation of the study will be given to the informants
before the recording. A written consent form will be signed by the informant to allow the
researcher to use the data.

References