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Gendered Use of Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwan Mandarin: a Corpus Study

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Gendered Use of Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwan Mandarin: a Corpus Study Gendered Use of Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwan Mandarin: A Corpus Study The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Baumel, Jonathan P. 2020. Gendered Use of Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwan Mandarin: A Corpus Study. Bachelor's thesis, Harvard College. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37364706 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA GENDERED USE OF SENTENCE-FINAL PARTICLES IN TAIWAN MANDARIN: A CORPUS INQUIRY by Jonathan Baumel presented to the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts Harvard College March 2020 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my adviser, Prof. C.-T. James Huang, for the invaluable guidance he provided me in my research. I always emerged from our meetings with a deepened understanding of the material and a renewed motivation for the project. Among many other contributions, Prof. Huang had the idea of investigating English intonation, clarified many nuances of SFP pragmatics, and suggested several helpful references. I was grateful that he could bring Taiwanese Mandarin to life for me in Cambridge. I am also indebted to my other Taiwanese informant, Li Jen Tsai, who was exceptionally patient with my repeated requests for her insight. I frequently relied on her thorough and illuminating judgments in my analysis. I am grateful to Prof. H. T. Kung for suggesting how I could expand my discussion to the implications of this research for the field of corpus linguistics. Further, I would like to thank the Taiwanese friends from whom I originally learned Taiwan Mandarin and its sentence-final particles, including but not limited to Li Jen Tsai, Lili Tsai, Szuhan Hu, Alice Zhan, Fei Chen, and Henry Huang. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the impact of my seven months in Taiwan on my acquisition of Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. I would not have been able to complete this project without the knowledge I gained through my time abroad. And I am grateful to the people of Taiwan for making my experience there so enjoyable and conducive to learning. Table of Contents ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................... i 1. INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 1.1. The basis for gendered usage ..................................................................................1 1.2. Gendered usage in Mandarin ..................................................................................3 1.3. Intonation and particles ...........................................................................................4 1.4. SFPS in Guoyu ........................................................................................................6 2. METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................14 2.1. Corpus selection ....................................................................................................14 2.2. Dimensions of interest ..........................................................................................14 2.3. Problems of data collection ..................................................................................15 2.4. Algorithm for data collection................................................................................19 3. PREDICTIONS............................................................................................................21 3.1. The sentence-final particle o (喔) .........................................................................21 3.2. The sentence-final particle la (啦) .......................................................................22 3.3. The sentence-final particle ma (嘛) ......................................................................23 3.4. The sentence-final particle ei/ye (欸/耶) ..............................................................24 3.5. The conversational context ...................................................................................25 4. RESULTS ....................................................................................................................27 4.1. Cross-context ........................................................................................................27 4.2. Romantic opposite gender ....................................................................................29 4.3. Non-romantic opposite gender .............................................................................30 4.4. Non-romantic same gender ...................................................................................31 5. DISCUSSION ..............................................................................................................32 5.1. Main takeaways ....................................................................................................32 5.2. Limitations of this study .......................................................................................33 5.3. Gender and the SFP-intonation spectrum .............................................................36 5.4. Cross-linguistic expectations ................................................................................39 6. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................40 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................44 i Abstract Discourse particles are markers that convey the attitude of a speaker towards an utterance and serve to connect units of discourse. Previous research on discourse particles has investigated their pragmatic function, syntactic structure, and typological equivalents. Sociolinguistic research has additionally explored gendered associations of these particles. Sentence-final particles (SFPs) are a type of discourse particle and a distinctive feature of Taiwan Mandarin. Despite their use by both male and female speakers, SFPs in the language are often thought to be feminine words because of their role in sajiao, a coquettish speech behavior performed by women and children. This study suggests that there is an additional explanation for the gendered association: SFPs fulfill the pragmatic roles of “women’s language” as discussed in previous literature. A connection is proposed between the gendered use of SFPs and the gendered use of intonation in other languages. This study additionally gathers empirical data on SFPs to investigate the gender disparity in their usage. Using a selection of the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin comprising data from 40 speakers, 20 male and 20 female, the rates at which native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin use the SFPs o 喔, la 啦, ma 嘛, and ei/ye 欸/耶 were calculated for different conversational contexts. The results of the study show female speakers use all these particles at a higher rate, with the greatest gender disparity shown for ei/ye. Furthermore, the conversational context was shown to be related to the usage rates of ei/ye for male speakers, who used this particle twice as frequently when speaking with a female romantic partner than with non- romantic friends or peers. These results provide further evidence that SFPs play an important and nuanced role in the linguistic manifestation of gender identity in Taiwan. 1 1. Introduction 1.1 The basis for gendered usage Discourse is a complex social behavior that is not only a process of sharing information but also an outward projection of one’s identity (Benwell 2006). Considerations of status, education level, and gender can explain a range of linguistic decisions made by a speaker, and additionally can reflect the values of the broader community to which a speaker belongs. Gender, as one of the most salient features of a speaker’s identity, is manifested clearly in the language of male and female speakers. Research such as that of Robin Lakoff has established speech as one important tool that women use to display female identity, in accordance with society’s expectations for women (1972, 2004). In her seminal 1975 book Language and Woman’s Place, Lakoff identifies a variety of speech patterns that distinguish “women’s language” and offers explanations for their ubiquity among female speakers. She claims that failure to use these forms will result in being “ostracized” as unfeminine by both men and women (Lakoff 2004:40). While Lakoff’s discussion is primarily grounded in English, this inquiry, taking as a premise that both languages possess gendered usage, aims to demonstrate that correspondence exists between the features of women’s speech that Lakoff identifies in English and sentence-final particles in Taiwan Mandarin. The presence of such functional correspondences between linguistically distinct features are thought to be the result of typological factors; English and Taiwan Mandarin differ in many areas, notably in intonation and final particles. As a result, some expressive features of English are not available in Taiwan Mandarin and vice versa, and
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