Organizer: Catherine S. Farris, University of Northern Iowa
Chair: Hideko Abe, Vanderbilt University
Discussants: Haruko Minegishi Cook, University of Hawaii, Manoa; Timothy Light,
Western Michigan University
In the West, recent writings on language and gender are theoretically sophisticated, addressing issues of how language reproduces and, potentially, transforms the ideological structures of a society's gender system. However, there has been little reference to comparative or cross-cultural data in this literature. Asian languages and cultures in particular are underrepresented; with the exception of Japanese, there are virtually no references to research on any Asian languages. This panel is a modest contribution to the discourse, offering new perspectives on empirically-based language and gender research in Japanese and Chinese societies.
Hideko Abe's research reports on the first study to examine the speech of both female and male speakers of Japanese, in which she analyzes the use of gender-linked sentence-final particles. Abe argues that the use of sentence-final particles have nothing to do with psychological notions of "masculinity" or "femininity," rather, their use is based on "how a speaker satisfies the role he or she plays in a given context" and secondarily on how to benefit in negotiation. Marjorie Chan's and Roxana Fung's paper complements Abe's with an examination of sentence-final particle use in Cantonese/Chinese. Despite predictions that feminine-associated particles will be used less frequently as women participate more widely in public life in the People's Republic of China, in fact, they found that these particles are used frequently by women and men, despite the latter's denial of such usage. Finally, Catherine Farris analyzes videotapes of Mandarin/Chinese-speaking preschool girls in Taiwan, whom, she argues, are learning through discursive practices to produce two subject positions: "the virtuous wife and the good mother"; the former requiring womanly silence and modesty, the latter, verbal assertiveness.
Is Male Speech More Powerful than Female Speech?
Hideko N. Abe, Vanderbilt University
This is the first study examining the speech of both Japanese female and male speakers. While the study of female speech has received considerable attention, its counterpart has been ignored and assumed to be trivial. This study analyzes the most often discussed areas in linguistic studies of gender-sentence-final particles. These are traditionally grouped in three categories: feminine, masculine, and neutral. However, this categorization has never proven accurate in analyses of actual speech. Masculine sentence-final particles have been characterized as "rough," "powerful," or "assertive," and feminine forms have been labeled "soft" or "powerless." However, these are more fruitfully seen as "self-manipulatory strategies." All sentence-final forms-feminine, masculine, and neutral-are available to both male and female speakers, and whether they prefer one form over another has nothing to do with "masculinity" or "femininity." Rather, it has to do primarily with how a speaker satisfies the role he or she plays in a given context, and secondarily with how she or he can benefit in negotiation. This study critiques the long-standing stereotypes of Japanese men's speech as "rough" and "superior" to women's speech. By examining how men present themselves linguistically in power negotiations, we discover new criteria for speech forms that are only marginally related to gender. This study is based on a total of seven hours of audio-recorded data from three Japanese professional men during business meetings in Japan.
Gender-Marked Speech and Sentence-Final Particles in Cantonese
Roxana Suk-Yee Fung and Marjorie K. M. Chan, Ohio State University
This paper, which is based on a corpus of ten episodes of video tapes filmed in Canton City, People's Republic of China, will be a systematic study to explore gender differences in the selection of sentence-final particles, and in the frequency as well as use/non-use of certain sentence-final particles in the Cantonese dialect of the Chinese language.
Sentence-final particles in Cantonese often carry much of the intonation of the sentence. They may simply serve a grammatical function, but many seem to have a highly affective value. Jek (high tone) and je (high level tone) have often been viewed as feminine sentence-final particles whose use seem to be more characteristic of children's or younger women's speech (Cheung 1972, Light 1982, and Matthews and Yip 1990). Most male native speakers of Cantonese nowadays also deny that they have adopted these particles in their speech. Light (1982) predicts that feminine speech markers should be less frequently used, or used in reduced contexts in the People's Republic of China, because of women's increased participation in wider areas of society than in the previous 'old society.'
Contrary to these claims, our findings suggest that Cantonese females have not given up the je and jek particles, while males have significantly increased their usage of them in their speech. In our corpus, all men, in their thirties through sixties, use je and jek as frequently, if not more so, than the women. The ramifications of these findings will be addressed in the paper.
Silence and Speaking: Preschool Girls in Taiwan Discursively Construct Chinese
Gendered Subjectivities
Catherine S. Farris, University of Northern Iowa
In this paper, I will argue that the trajectory of Chinese girls' development is one in which girls simultaneously begin to produce discursively two subject positions of central importance in Chinese women's lives: "the virtuous wife and the good mother" (xian qi liang mu). The former position requires, in accordance with traditional Confucian precepts, womanly silence and modesty. The latter position, however, requires verbal and behavioral assertiveness. Thus, girls are not always quiet; we must specify those settings within the institutional structure of the (pre-) school when girls are silent and when they are outspoken. The more formal contexts as opposed to informal ones appear to elicit mostly silence from girls, and boys dominate the stage. Developmental differences are evident in this silent "stance"; in the two younger classes, many girls speak out as freely as boys, whereas, in the older classes, girls seem to be constrained by certain settings. How does this movement from speaking to silence take place? If girls are learning to allow boys to dominate more public arenas of discourse, they are not rendered totally mute. Rather, drawing on the authoritarian/nurturant roles of big sisters, aunts, and grandmothers, as well as mothers, girls are also learning to mother younger children and to combine a blossoming heterosexual interactional style with a maternal attitude vis-à-vis male peers. This research is drawn from videotapes of naturally occurring conversations, daily observations, and journal notes at a private, four-year preschool in Taipei, ROC. The presentation will include clips of videotaped data.