Gender and the use of pragmatic particles in Indonesian

Abstract

Studies of male and female conversational styles in several cultures have shown differences in a number of areas, including the use of pragmatic particles. In most studies, women have been shown to behave more cooperatively, and men more competitively. This paper presents a study of two pragmatic particles in Indonesian conversations, kan and iya/ya, which cover a range of functions similar to English tag questions and the pragmatic particle you know. Given these similarities, parallel differences in usage might have been expected. However, differences occur much less frequently than has been the case in these other studies, and although the direction of such gender biases as were observed was generally in the same direction as found in other studies, on the whole Indonesian usage by both genders was facilitative. This result is then seen as a reflection of Indonesian cultural values, which place a premium on maintaining the appearance of cooperative behavior.

Utterance-final particles in Klang Valley Malay

“…This is different from Indonesian, in which the UFP kan does not exhibit clearly gendered patterns of usage (Wouk 1999).…”

“…UFPs have been studied in the following Malay varieties: West Malaysian Malay (Koh 1990: 77-86;Goddard 1994Goddard , 2001, Sabah Malay (Hoogervorst 2011: 68-73), Manado Malay (Stoel 2005), Jakartan Indonesian (Ikranagara 1975;Sneddon 2006), and Indonesian (Wouk 1998(Wouk , 1999(Wouk , 2001Sari 2008Sari , 2011. UFPs in the English of Malaysia and Singapore have been examined by Platt and Mian (1989), Gupta (1992), and Li et al (2016.…”

Some introductory notes on the development and characteristics of Sabah Malay

“…Examples in English include 'you know', 'isn't it' and 'actually'. There is not much information on discourse particles in Malay varieties, although an increasing amount of literature is gradually improving this situation (Goddard 1994;Wouk 1998Wouk , 1999Wouk , 2001Ewing 2005;Stoel 2005;Sneddon 2006). …”

Politeness markers in French: post-posed quoi in the Tourist Office

“…To this list, we can add "pragmatic expressions" (Erman 1987;1992), "pragmatic markers" (Brinton 1996;Andersen 2000;Andersen and Fretheim 2000), "discourse particle" (Hansen 1998), and "pragmatic particle" (Wouk 1999;Beeching 2002). Linguistic items such as these have been the subject of a number of studies in different languages in recent years and Jucker and Ziv (1998) enumerate the variety of terms which are used to refer to them in the literature which include discourse markers, connectives, fillers, turn-takers, prompters, attitude markers, and hedging devices.…”