Converging toward the interlocutor: Sentence-final forms in Japanese conversations

Abstract

Japanese is widely known as a language with distinctive feminine and masculine styles. The use of sentence-final forms is one of the areas where the gender-based differences are most explicit (Tsujimura 1996). Okamoto and Sato (1992) examined Japanese sentence-final forms in women's speech across generations and found that younger speakers used less stereotypical feminine forms. Using a similar coding system as Okamoto and Sato's (1992), we categorized the sentence-final forms as 1) strongly feminine, 2) moderately feminine, 3) neutral, 4) moderately masculine, and 5) strongly masculine. Our study departs from previous studies in two ways. First, we examined speech of male speakers as well as females. Second, we separated single sex and cross sex interactions to investigate the influence of the addressee. The corpus consists of twelve dyads in natural settings. The participants, who spoke standard Japanese, were ages 24 to 35. Our data indicate that the sex of the interlocutor affects speech style: both women and men employed different styles in the single sex conversations and the cross sex conversations. We will discuss gender-based differences and similarities in the speech of Japanese women and men, and how the speakers converge to the “gendered” style of the interlocutors. Finally, a discussion of the findings and implications for future gender-based studies of Japanese sentence-final forms will be addressed.