Taboo words selected for this study

Several Japanese taboo words were selected for analysis and the reason for choosing these particular expressions was the relatively high frequency of their use. Relatively, because taboo words in general don’t feature in everyday Japanese conversation very often. However, within the taboo category the selected forms can be counted among the representative. The list is as follows:

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1. Kuso – “shit,” similarly to the English word can be used as an independent noun, an exclamation or as a part of a compound; e.g. baba

“old woman” can be modified to kusobaba in order to add insult to the reference.

2. Chikushō – “beast,” “brute,” also used as an exclamation in contexts similar to kuso. Related to the concept of animals as one of the Buddhist realms of existence, thus making it an indirect reference to the supernatural, which is one of the categories of taboo listed in Apte (2001).

3. Yarō – a potentially insulting vulgar reference to a person (especially a man), not unlike yatsu¹⁹. Since it is written by combining the characters for “field” and one of the several characters for “man,” its offensive power may stem from the implication of low birth or poor education, similarly to words like “bumpkin” or “redneck,” although unlike the two as a reference it is not limited to people who come from a particular background.

4. Baka – “idiot,” “fool.” As an insult it is possibly a metaphorically linked to the semantic category of animals, considering it is written using Chinese characters for “horse” and “deer.” This would make baka a rare example of offensively using this metaphoric connection in Japanese, where ridiculing people by constructing their identities as animalistic is much less common than in English or Polish. However, while words such as “pig”

or “bitch” can function both as a metaphoric insult and as a neutral reference to an actual animal, there is no species of fauna which is called baka. This word is located on the borderline between taboo and non-taboo, since it is relatively mild, but still has enough of a damaging potential to demand care from the user.

The focus of this study were the sentences within the corpus in which the abovementioned taboo words co-occurred with markers of femininity and masculinity. In this case, two categories of such markers were used: first-person pronominal forms and sentence-final particles.

The first category is called “pronominal forms” rather than “pronouns”

19 See section 5.2.1

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because Japanese does not possess a gramatically distinct class of words which only serve a personal deictic function, like the English “me,” “you” and its Polish equivalents do. Rather, Japanese pronominal forms are not functionally different from Japanese nouns, and often do carry more meaning than just simple personal reference. The following forms have been chosen:

1. Ore – masculine, informal and “rough”

2. Boku – masculine, somewhat informal, but more “gentle” and associated to some extent with young boys (but also used by adult men).

3. Atashi – feminine and informal.

4. Atakushi – feminine and somewhat formal.

Sentence-final particles, on the other hand, are a feature of Japanese without even a rough equivalent in Polish or English. As the name suggests, they are added at the end of the sentence and perform a modal, emphatic or hortative function, expressing the degree to which the speaker is confident about the truthfulness of his or her own utterance, inviting the hearer to agree with the utterance, and so on.

1. Wa (also variations wayo, wane) – emphasizing. Feminine if its intonation is rising (wa↑), masculine if the intonation is falling (wa↓).

2. Kashira – speculative (expresses a lack of certainty), feminine.

3. Ze, zo – emphasizing and masculine, with some small differences in usage between the two.

The connection of those forms to gender is less clear cut than, for example, the connection between the gender self-identification of the speaker and grammatical gender in Polish. If one wishes to say “I ate” in Polish, a male form of the verb “to eat,” zjadłem, is used if the speakers self-identifies as a male, and the female form zjadłam is used the speaker self-identifies as a female. There is not much more to say about that.

In Japanese, however, it would be more accurate to say that forms such as ore or zo invoke an air roughness and so by association were indirectly linked to a rough masculinity. In effect, while they tend to be used more often by men,

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some women still use it, so the difference is not as categorical as in the case of grammatical gender. I have used the word “traditional” to refer to the character of these pronominal forms and sentence-final particles as gender markers, because they are not linked to maleness and femaleness as biological categories, but to masculinity and feminity as stereotypes, and stereotypes can be volatile and change quickly with the times.

The next section will deal with with the same problem of taboo language in a corpus of written language, but in a corpus of Polish. There I take advantage of Polish grammatical gender to identify the sex of the speaker, in order to analyze the link between gender and taboo words. Such method is not possible when analyzing Japanese data, as Japanese does not have grammatical gender. On the other hand, in this section, when looking at Japanese, I treat first-person pronominal forms and end-sentence particles as gender markers, whereas in Polish the former do not signify gender and the latter do not exist.

I would argue that for the purposes of the present study this apparent asymmetry is merely superficial. The point here is to collect utterances which contain both: 1) a form commonly identified by the relevant speech community as masculine or feminine and 2) a form considered to be taboo. In the case of real speakers of Polish, their choice of grammatical gender when talking about themselves reveals how they position themselves on the simple male/female binary, because that’s the only choice the language offers. Theoretically, neutral forms of first-person verbs are not unthinkable (e.g. zjadłom for “I ate”), but in practice they do not seem to be used at all, perhaps because they seem to be devoid of a human aspect and thus unattractive as a self-reference. In any case, the choice of grammatical gender has very little to do with expressing attributes associated with masculinity and femininity, such as roughness, decisiveness, gentleness or caring.

However, the vast majority of data in both corpora is not produced by real speakers, at least not directly. Instead, the speech comes from fictional characters which are born in the mind of the author, as is the speech itself.

Therefore, in this case identifying grammatical gender does not lead to conclusions concerning the biological gender, as a fictional character does not have any biology to speak of. Here, grammatical gender does become a marker

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of masculinity/femininity, because when an author of fiction chooses a sex and a certain manner of conduct for a character in a story, that choice reflects the author’s mental image of gender in the sociocultural sense. In sum, although chapter 5.1 puts scrutiny to features of Japanese and Polish which are not equivalent in every way, I propose that in the context of fiction they share the role of marking sociocultural gender.