Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: a handbook for Supervisors

Two aspects of Japanese sentence final expressions in
relation to gender : expressing modality and constructing
stereotypes
Summar y of the research
This project examines the speech of Japanese women and men. 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. The literature
suggests 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. These features, especially the lack of assertiveness, encour-
age the addressees 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 conversa-
tion-style writing, such as novels, film scripts, advertisements and magazine
articles. In those written conversations, women are consistently enforcing
their femininity and men their masculinity with the ending forms. However,
according to recent studies, gender-related forms are not used as frequently in
actual conversation as they are seen in written texts, and some are even disap-
pearing. Moreover, cross-gender usage has been observed.
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 style.