Variation, gender and perception : the social meaning of Japanese linguistic variables

Stacey Sherwood, Jason A. Shaw, Shigeto Kawahara, Robert Mailhammer, Mark Antoniou

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The social categories that characterize a speaker frequently correlate with the use of specific linguistic variables. Research suggests that such correlations are sometimes recognized as socially-indexed meanings. This study examines Japanese individuals' attitudes toward variables that have been shown to correlate with the social category of gender in production. In particular, we contrast patterns of gendered variation that (i) have been prescriptively associated with speaker sex and (ii) tend to correlate with gender in speech production but are outside of the set of prescriptive "women's language". We found that individuals have formed associations between the gender of the speaker and prescriptive variables but not other patterns of variation. Additionally, knowledge of the speech context of the variables had no significant effect on individuals' judgments. The results indicate that not all social information available from patterns of language use is recovered by listeners. More broadly, examining the transmission of social meaning through linguistic variation requires a combination of production- and perception-based research methods.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)959-995
Number of pages37
JournalLinguistics
Volume61
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston.

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2023 the author(s). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Keywords

  • gender
  • Japanese
  • variation
  • perception
  • social meaning

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