Gendered Use of Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwan Mandarin: A Corpus Study

Abstract

Discourse particles are markers that convey the attitude of a speaker towards an utterance and serve to connect units of discourse. Previous research on discourse particles has investigated their pragmatic function, syntactic structure, and typological equivalents. Sociolinguistic research has additionally explored gendered associations of these particles. Sentence-final particles (SFPs) are a type of discourse particle and a distinctive feature of Taiwan Mandarin. Despite their use by both male and female speakers, SFPs in the language are often thought to be feminine words because of their role in sajiao, a coquettish speech behavior performed by women and children. This study suggests that there is an additional explanation for the gendered association: SFPs fulfill the pragmatic roles of “women’s language” as discussed in previous literature. A connection is proposed between the gendered use of SFPs and the gendered use of intonation in other languages. This study additionally gathers empirical data on SFPs to investigate the gender disparity in their usage. Using a selection of the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin comprising data from 40 speakers, 20 male and 20 female, the rates at which native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin use the SFPs o 喔, la 啦, ma 嘛, and ei/ye 欸/耶 were calculated for different conversational contexts. The results of the study show female speakers use all these particles at a higher rate, with the greatest gender disparity shown for ei/ye. Furthermore, the conversational context was shown to be related to the usage rates of ei/ye for male speakers, who used this particle twice as frequently when speaking with a female romantic partner than with non-romantic friends or peers. These results provide further evidence that SFPs play an important and nuanced role in the linguistic manifestation of gender identity in Taiwan.