Title

Prosodic Analysis of the Interactional Particle Ne in Women’s and Men’s Japanese

Ne, one of the most frequently used interactional particles in Japanese, has long been regarded as gender-neutral (e.g., McGloin 1990; Ide and Yoshida 1999; Okamoto 1995b). Recent studies (e.g., Okamoto 1995a; Sreetharan 2004) have argued against a strictly categorical approach to ne, and have identified masculine and feminine uses of this particle based on its co-occurrence with different lexical categories. For example, NP+ne (e.g., ringo ne ‘apple+ne’) is more characteristic of feminine speech than COP+ne (e.g., ringo da ne ‘apple+COP+ne’). However, these studies do not take into account the role of prosody in the production of gender differentiation. Filling this gap in research, this paper shows that ne interacts not only with accompanying lexical categories but also with prosodic elements to produce gendered effects.

In order to separate the possible effects of biological sex, performed gender and sentential position on the duration and pitch of ne, we asked ten male and ten female monodialectal native speakers of standard Japanese to read a set of gender-neutral sentences containing ne in sentence-initial, -medial, and -final positions. Participants were recorded in three conditions: 1) a natural speech style, 2) a role-played masculine (RM) style, and 3) a role-played feminine (RF) style. Duration, pitch minimum and pitch maximum were measured for each sentence and for each particle ne.

Results indicate that both males and females used several linguistic resources on both sentences and the particle ne, when performing feminine gender. First, the RF style was associated with higher pitch maxima than the RM style. Within a group (i.e., males or females), pitch maxima varied significantly while pitch minima did not; both sexes performed RF and RM styles by setting an appropriate highest pitch, rather than an appropriate lowest pitch. Second, for both sexes, RF style was characterized by a significantly larger pitch range than RM style. Third, when performing the feminine style, both males and females realized ne with significantly longer duration, and as a significantly larger proportion of the duration of the sentence.

Our findings corroborate claims in the existing literature (e.g., Ohara 1992; 2001) regarding prosodic characteristics of Japanese feminine language; namely, that it involves the use of high pitch and large pitch range. However, the sociolinguistic functions of relative duration have not been much discussed in the literature. This study shows that gendered effects in standard Japanese are also expressed in durational patterns. While the particle ne has been described as ‘gender-neutral’ because of its availability for use by both genders, the prosody of ne is significantly affected by gender.