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

particles and the way they contribute to marking the gender of a speaker. My
hypothesis is that there is not much clear distinction between women’s and
men’s actual speech in terms of particle use, but stereotypical women’s and
men’s speech exists in Japanese society. What makes this stereotypical speech is
the connection of some functions of these particles and the stereotypical image
of women or men. In order to make this connection clear, the function of each
particle should be made clear. The following are the questions to be asked:
●
Why are particular sentence final expressions associated with gender?
What are their functions?
●
When and how are these sentence final expressions actually used? What
are the effects of these expressions?
●
Is there any agreement among Japanese speakers on the stereotypical use
of these gender-related sentence final expressions? Is there any difference
between the actual use of these sentence final expressions and the stereo-
typical use of them?
Definitions of terms
●
Sentence Final Expressions: These include sentence final particles, copulas,
and style markers such as masu forms.
●
Sentence Final Particles: These are sometimes referred as inter-personal parti-
cles as they are used for smooth communication and are not directly related
to the proposition or the message of the utterance. Some of them, specifi-
cally, ne, yo, na, and sa can be used in the middle of a sentence. In theory,
they can be inserted after any word, or a particle, if a word is followed by a