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Viewing report
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Sex Exclusive Differences in Modern Japanese Language. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Jan 2009, Pages: 176
Why can’t a Japanese girl say ‘Stop it!’ to the
molester who is
touching her body?
Previous studies indicate that linguistic sex
differences reflect the
societal hierarchy of the speakers’ status.
Nonetheless, in Japanese
language, women cannot use some phrases regardless of
their social
positions. Those forms are used exclusively by men.
On the contrary, the examination of conversation data
reveals that
sex differences occur with striking infrequency. In
order to elucidate
this complication, I postulate two types of rules,
prescriptive and
proscriptive, that operate upon speakers to maintain
mutual
exclusiveness between two sexes. Proscriptive rules
prohibit
transgressions of the boundaries between the sexes.
Since preferred
images of a gender change over time, prescriptive
rules are fluid. On
the other hand, the violation of proscriptive rules
brings serious
penalty to speakers.
This book also explores the historical process in
which female
students’ speech, which was accused as ‘coarse
speech’ at first,
became the model speech for Japanese women.
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