Gender In Japanese Sentence-Final Particles

In Japanese language one can convey his or her masculinity or femininity through gender-differentiated sentence-final particles (male sentence-final particles and female sentence-final particles). Language changes through time, space and technological development. Nowadays, Japanese men and women manipulate both male and female sentence-final particles in expression of emotion, nuance, and solidarity as social distance reduced.This thesis bases on the data of actors’lines in Japanese soap operas. In order to express the situation of sentence-final particles’current usage by male and female performers respectively, statistic method is used to collect twenty-three common sentence-final particles from4famous Japanese soap operas which were all broadcast after2000, and statistically analyze the volume of use and utility rate of sentence-final particles. This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter mainly introduces the origin of the problem, research purposes and significance, research objects, and major research methods of this thesis. The second chapter describes the literature review from the two aspects of "Gender" and "Sentence-final Particles" to provide theoretical basis for this research. The third chapter expounds the investigation summary, explains the selection standards and the word processing of soap operas as basic research database in detail. Also introduces the data collection and the statistical approach of this research. The fourth chapter analyzes the statistics result of the data combined with example sentences. The fifth chapter introduces the conclusion of this thesis and provides the problem to solve in the following researches. This thesis proved the neutral trend of usage of sentence-final particles in Japanese both by male and female as social distance reduced.