Gender performance and intonation in a Japanese sentence-final particle yo.ne

1. Gender performance and intonation in a Japanese sentence-final particle yo.ne Yumiko Enyo enyo@hawaii.edu University of Hawaii, Manoa

2. Ideology and Practice (Cameron & Kulick, 2003) “Speakers take up the ideological resources available in a given community to construct identities for themselves in practice” (p.136) Ideology: “the representation of social types and their ways of speaking and writing which circulate in a given society” (p.135) Practice: “what we observe when we investigate the behavior of real people in real situations.” (p.135)

3. Otoko kotoba ‘men’s language’ and Onna kotoba ‘women’s language’ In Japanese, sentence-final particles (SFPs) can index - masculinity (e.g., zo, ze, na) and - femininity (e.g., kashira). There are also ‘gender-neutral’ SFPs as ne, and yo.ne. (Sreetharan, 2004)

4. On SFPs and prosody • Ideological resources of gender in Japanese through performance (Anderson, Hiramoto & Wong 2005) A ‘gender-neutral’ SFP ne can be used differently for masculine and feminine styles in prosody. 2. Final pitch contour Falling tone for MAS, rising tone for FEM in: wa (McGloin 1993), naa (Ide & Yoshida 1999), ne (Hiramoto & Wong 2004)

5. Gaps in study: Prosody and language external factors • Prosody and working experience: Not investigated. - Language training at companies. - Japanese women claim that they acquired ‘women’s language’ through their working experience and married life. (Kobayashi, 1993) Q: Do people with working experience perform more stereotypically than people with no working experience? • Prosody and language attitude: Not investigated. Q: Do people who view clear difference between men’s and women’s language perform with more stereotypical features? Q: Do people who are against merger of men’s and women’s language perform with more stereotypical features?

6. Research questions: • How do native speakers of Japanese differentiate masculine and feminine styles by utilizing prosodic features of yo.ne? • How do their choices of prosodic features relate to language external factors: - gender, - working experience, and - language attitude.

7. On SFP yo.ne • Yo.ne is a gender-neutral serial SFP (yo & ne) when it is preceded by a bare verb or an adjective. ** Yo.ne makes a sentence into a tag question. • Goro-wa kono hon yon-da. (falling tone) Goro –TOP this book read-PAST “Goro read this book.” b) Goro-wa kono hon yon-da yo ne. Goro-TOP this book read-PAST PART PART “Goro read this book, didn’t he?”

8. Prediction:Prosodic features of the SFP yo.nein masculine and feminine performance

9. On Final rising contour for SFP Eda (2000): Two different rising contour patterns of SFP nechange the meaning. 1) The speaker wants to confirm his/her assumption, since the information is NOT shared. 2) The speaker is making a comment about the information being shared by the listener.

10. Data Recordings of sentence reading by 10 male and 10 female Japanese native speakers. • Lived in the Kanto area before they came to Hawaii. • Ages from 21 to 43 (the average of men: 30, women: 31.5) • Half of each gender group has working experience (longer than 2 years of experience as full-time office workers).

11. Instruction to a male participant (in Japanese) Please read the sentence below twice as if you were talking to a male friend of the same generation. a) [confirming the assumption of the speaker = Speaker-only Information] ‘You want to confirm whether or not your friend read this book. Please ask:’ Kono hon yon-da yo ne this book read-PAST PART PART “You read this book, didn’t you?”

12. Instruction (2) Please read the sentence below twice as if you were talking to a male friend of the same generation. b) [commenting on shared information = Shared Information] ‘You are talking about an argument among classmates. Tell your friend “It is Goro who is bad.” Then, ask your friend to agree with your comment.’ Goro-ga warui. Goro-ga warui yo ne. NAME-NOM bad PART PART “Goro[NAME] is bad, isn’t he?”

13. Instruction (3) 2) Read the same sentences twice each as a woman. You are talking to a female friend of the same generation. - Instruction for women: their own performance, followed by masculine performance. - 2 sentences x Read twice x 2 performances (MAS/FEM) = 8 tokens per participant - Recording of sentence reading: Directly to computer with Praat, 11 K Hz sampling frequency.

14. Information Sheet & Interview • Background information sheet. (pre-recording) e.g., age, sex, working experience 2) Follow-up interview conducted in Japanese a) Men’s/women’s language distinction ‘Do you think that men’s language and women’s language are different?’ b) Resistance to change ‘ Some observe that men’s and women’s language have recently merged. Would you prefer to see that men and women use Japanese language differently in the future?’

15. Measurement: Duration and pitch range The boundaries are determined by inspection of spectrogram focusing on 1st formant and 2nd formant, wave forms, and the researcher’s impressionistic judgment as a native speaker. A male participant’s MAS performance The same participant’s FEM performance

16. Duration and Range Values • Duration: FEM (ms) – MAS (ms) * Positive values match prediction (FEM>MAS) • Range: FEM (Hz) – MAS (Hz) * Positive values match prediction (FEM > MAS)

17. NOT Worked Worked Is FEM Duration of yo.ne longer than MAS duration?Positive value of yo.ne (ms) / sentence (ms)confirms the prediction. (N=22)

18. NOT Worked Worked Is FEM Range of yo.newider than MAS range?Positive value confirms the prediction. (N=29)(Hz)

19. Measurement: Pitch contour The previous peak of pitch track: 164.09 Hz (From Slide #15) • Contour value: • End point Peak • 119.31 Hz – 164.09 Hz = - 44.78 Hz • Due to many cases of pitch mis-tracking, the second token of each performance is measured, unless the first token captures the pitch movement better. End point: 119.31Hz

20. Focus of contour analysis Prediction: FEM has rising contour. Focus of the analysis: Does FEM performance of a speaker have final-rising contour?

21. Does FEM Performance have final-rising contour?Positive value higher than 30Hz = rising contour (N=15) (Hz) NOT Worked Worked

22. Working experience and STYLES:MEN & WOMEN COMBINED Highlighted cells: Statistically significant (<.05) People with working experience use more final-rising contourfor FEM performance than people without working experience(P=.0317).

23. Working experience and STYLES:MEN vs. WOMEN Women with working experience have a near-significant tendency (P=.0639) to use final-rising contour for FEM performance than women without working experience.

24. .05 .06 .04 .05 .03 Not worked .04 .02 .03 .01 .02 Worked .01 0 0 -.01 -.01 -.02 -.02 -.03 -.03 Male -.04 Female Female Male Working Experience and STYLES:Duration Women with working experience make distinction in STYLES using longer yo.ne in Sentence B, but not in Sentence A. Men don’t make significant distinction in STYLES using longer yo.ne. Sentence A (Speaker-only information) Sentence B (Shared information) Duration (ms) Duration (ms) P=.0302

25. 150 60 125 50 100 40 75 30 Not worked 20 50 10 25 Worked 0 0 -10 -25 -20 -50 -30 -75 -40 -100 Female Male Female Male Working Experience and STYLES:Contour Both men and women with working experience tend to make distinction in STYLES using final rising contour in Sentence B (P=.0084), but not in Sentence A. Sentence A (Speaker-only Information) Sentence B (Shared information) Contour (Hz) Contour (Hz) P=.0617 P=.0724

26. Language Attitude 1Men’s/women’s language distinction and STYLES:‘Do you think that men’s language and women’s language are different?’MEN & WOMEN COMBINED Men’s/women’s language distinction is not a significant factor.

27. Language Attitude 1Men’s/women’s language distinction and STYLES: MEN vs. WOMEN * Data exclusion: 1 woman who answered that men’s and women’s language is ‘Not different.’ Men’s/women’s language distinction is not a significant factor.

28. Language Attitude 2Resistance to change and STYLES:‘Would you prefer to see that men and women use Japanese language differently in the future?’MEN & WOMEN COMBINED * Data exclusion:1 woman who answered that she doesn’t want to see any merger between men and women’s language. Resistance to Change is not a significant factor.

29. Language Attitude 2Resistance to Change and STYLES:Men vs. Women Among women, the people who want to keep some style distinction tend to make the duration shorter than the people who are positive about the language merger between men and women (P=.0385). Among men, Resistance to Change is not a significant factor.

30. .05 .04 .07 .03 .06 .02 .05 .01 .04 0 .03 -.01 -.02 .02 -.03 .01 -.04 0 Female Male -.01 -.02 -.03 Language attitude and STYLES: Duration--- Between two sentences However, women who did not expressed Resistance to Change tend to make FEM performance of yo.ne longer only in sentence B (ANOVA, P=.0316). Sentence B (Shared information) Sentence A (Speaker-only Information) Duration (ms) Duration (ms) Change is OK Keep some features Female Male

31. On difference between men and women: Women’s performances are strongly influenced by their working experience and their opinions(Resistance to Change). ‘We [= adult women] learned how to choose appropriate expressions suitable to particular situation and listener through our job experience and marriage.’ (Kobayashi, 1993 from a participant’s report)

32. Duration, Range and Contour In order to make STYLE distinction, - Final rising pitch contour is commonly used by people with working experience (Slide #22). - Duration is used among two groups of people: (i) women who have working experience (Slide #24), and (ii) women who do not express any resistance to change (Slide #29).

33. Shared information vs. speaker-only information sentences All interaction found in - working experience and STYLE (#24, 25) - language attitude and STYLE (#30) are significant in Sentence B (Speaker-listener shared information), not in Sentence A (Speaker-only information).

34. Resistance to change 1) The ‘change is OK’ group: Language change is a natural phenomenon - “Language change is neither a good or a bad thing.” - “Because the language use changes as people get older, it is natural to see some changes over the time.” 2) The ‘want to keep some MAS/FEM features’ group: Positive evaluation about having feminine resources - “Because I prefer to have more resources available to express myself.” - “Because I am not comfortable if I use ‘rough’ masculine features.” Women who accept language change as a natural phenomenon are more willing to use stereotypical gender features, while women who gave evaluative comment on gendered features may avoid performing stereotypical features.

35. Future direction • More data to be analyzed. B) Perception tests to investigate the relationship between prosodic information and listeners’ perception of masculinity and femininity. e.g., How much of a durational difference makes the stimuli sound feminine?

36. Acknowledgement • Dr. Andrew Wong • Dr. Victoria Anderson • Dr. Amy Schafer • Ms. Mie Hiramoto • Ms. Kaori Ueki • Participants of my study • Sociolinguistics seminar, Fall 2005, at University of Hawaii, Manoa

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