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use orders most often out of all the imperatives, while female characters use
other forms more often than orders (Faye, requests 47 percent; Ed, requests 46
percent; guest protagonists, requests 46 percent; and side characters, sugges-
tions 40 percent). The sole exception in the female group is the villain, Twinkle,
and this, again, highlights her linguistic non-conformity to idealized women’s
language.
4.3 Tag-questions
Women’s more frequent use of tag questions was among the features of
women’s language listed by Lakoff (2004 [1975]). For this study, both tag and
pseudo-tag questions were quantified. A summary of the tag question usage in
the data and the total number of tokens are: Jet and Spike 19 percent (89), Faye
18 percent (44), Ed 18 percent (7); guest protagonists, male 12 percent (13),
female 10 percent (7); side characters, male 11 percent (27), female 10 percent
(5); villains, male 11 percent (14), female 36 percent (4). As was the case with
imperatives, the total number of tag questions does not easily allow one to
characterize general linguistic features of male and female characters’ speech
(e.g., Holmes 1982; Cameron, McAlinden & O’Leary 1988). The tag question
tokens were therefore further classified into subcategories according to their
functions: mitigating, challenging, epistemic, or monologue. Tag questions
whose function is to soften potential negative impact, such as conflict or criti-
cism are considered mitigating, whereas challenging tags are used to break a
long pause or for an admission of guilt. Clarification of preceding uncertainty
is epistemic. Tags seen in characters’ monologues were classified separately
as they serve none of the above purposes. Examples of each function are as
follows:
(5)
Different functions of tag questions
(a) Mitigating, Ep. 11: Toys in Attic [talking to Jet after winning a bet]
FAYE:
I’d actually prefer payment in cash. I’m not a pawn
shop, y’know.
(b) Challenging, Ep. 8: Waltz for Venus [a man addressing a mafia boss]
ROCO:
I’m real sorry but I dropped it. Guess you’re not gonna
buy that, huh?
(c) Epistemic, Ep. 8: Waltz for Venus [a mafia boss addressing a man]
PICCARO: My little Roco. You know I’ve heard you have a younger
sister somewhere. Is that true?
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Mie Hiramoto
(d) Monologue, Ep. 17: Mushroom Samba [to justify stealing food]
JET:
Hey, well now. This thing can’t really be here, can it? So
I can’t really be faulted for eating something that’s not
here.
At the level of these subcategorizations, the differences between male and
female characters in their use of tag questions become more apparent. The
challenge function is almost categorically used by males. On the other hand,
the mitigation function is used more by women than men: Faye (59 percent);
Ed (57 percent), female guest protagonists (57 percent), female side characters
(60 percent), and the female villain, Twinkle (25 percent) vs. male main charac-
ters (25 percent), male guest protagonists (38 percent), male side characters (48
percent), and male villains (7 percent). Generally, villains, both male and
female, used less mitigating tags and more epistemic tags (64 percent for male
and 75 percent for female), suggesting that the bad guys did not moderate the
intensity of their speech. This result coincides with the findings for the use of
imperatives, where both male and female villain characters used the order-type
imperatives the most (67 percent for male and also 67 percent for female). Here,
the female villain Twinkle flouts gender norms, as her speech style clearly does
not conform to the suggested feminine linguistic styles that women use more
tag questions (and that these tag questions are often used for seeking asser-
tions) or polite requests (imperatives with ‘please’) than men. Again, Twinkle’s
use of tag questions demonstrates how non-normative women are indexed by
non-normative language. This is in contrast to the way in which a heterosexu-
ally normative female character is indexed with normative language, as is the
case with Faye’s use of tag questions. Although Faye is the only female charac-
ter to use challenging tag questions (9 percent), there are only four such tokens
in the data, whereas she uses mitigating tag questions significantly more (26
instances, 59 percent of her tag question usage). Her use of imperatives is
mainly limited to requests (46 percent and 58 instances); orders occur only nine
times (7 percent), resulting in an overall usage of tag questions and imperatives
that was quite the opposite of Twinkle.
4.4 Hedging
The final gendered linguistic feature in the American English dubbing data to
be discussed is the use of hedging. The number of male characters using
hedges, and the corresponding total number of tokens are: for main characters
(2; 47), guest protagonists (6; 41), side characters (23; 44), and villains (7; 9).
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Gendered expressions in a popular anime
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For female characters, these numbers are Faye (1; 64), Ed (1; 3), guest protago-
nists (5; 10), side characters (4; 10), and villains (1; 1). Although CB has the
same number of male and female main characters (Spike, Jet, Faye, and Ed),
male side characters greatly outnumber their female counterparts. Excluding
the main characters, there are 114 males (8 guest protagonists; 76 side charac-
ters; and 30 villains) and only 18 females (6 guest protagonists; 10 side charac-
ters; and 1 villain). Additionally, the female main characters, Faye and Ed, do
not appear in all 26 episodes of the series as do Spike and Jet. Among the
four features selected for investigation, use of hedging reflected the unevenly
balanced availability of the data the most.
Hedging utterances that appeared in the data include uh, maybe, I guess, I
think, I mean, kinda, oh, well, so, yeah, and hmm. In this study, instances of
hedges accompanying a sentence were quantified; isolated instances of such
expressions were excluded. Due to lack of female irregular character data, it is
difficult to generalize male and female characters’ use of hedging; however,
interesting findings can be seen by contrasting Faye’s and Ed’s results. The
distributions of hedging used by the main characters are: Jet (20), Spike (27),
Faye (64), and Ed (3). The heterosexually normative Faye used hedging very
frequently compared to other characters. In many cases, she hedges more than
once in a single utterance:
(6)
Faye’s multiple hedging (Ep. 18: Speak Like a Child)
Oh, I see. Hmm, that’s how it is. Oh well. Uh, listen, Ed. I guess, if
they’re that lonely without me, I have no choice. I’m coming back to the
ship.
In all four gendered linguistic features observed here (expletives, imperatives,
tag questions, and hedging), 26 percent of Faye’s entire tokens are hedges. In
spite of her defiant bounty-hunter nature, Faye’s feminine speech style again
conforms to that of an ideal woman in terms of hegemonic heterosexuality. On
the contrary, Ed, the heterosexually non-normative female character, does not
show frequent use of hedging, a feminine linguistic feature, using hedging only
three times in the entire series. Considering the fact she has the smallest num-
ber of appearances of any main character in CB, her tokens here are still dispro-
portionately small.
5 Discussion
Both the Japanese and American English data show that characters in CB are
constructed around strong ideological gender norms. As the data for the Japa-
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