Date Available

12-10-2021

Year of Publication

2021

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Document Type

Master's Thesis

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Linguistics

First Advisor

Dr. Edward Barrett

Abstract

This article analyzes 4 episodes of the Japanese reality television program Terrace house: Aloha State for instances of gender indexing language to investigate the gap between actual speaker usage of these features and the linguistic ideology surrounding their usage as is perpetrated and perpetuated by media. Specifically, the gender indexing features which will be investigated to accomplish this are sentence final particles and first-person pronouns. Instances of these linguistic features are typically presented as features of gendered language, but as will be demonstrated, this does match their actual usage by speakers. I set out to answer three research questions, (1) what is the frequency with which Japanese-speakers actually use gender indexing features on Terrace House, (2) how are these forms being used by the speakers to take stances and construct identity, (3) is there a gap between the linguistic ideology behind these gender indexing features and their reality that can be determined through examining how they are attributed to speakers through English translated into Japanese subtitles. Discourse analysis is an incisive methodology for this study as I intend to show the relationship between discourse and gender & linguistic ideology.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2021.476

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