Khari’s Reviews > Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People > Status Update

...could conclude that the author caused specific sentence final particles to come into use for a specific subgroup of people.

But...there are other characters in Naruto, lots of them, and what do they do? Talk like normal Japanese people. If we look at the language produced by all the characters and not just Naruto, we would see that on average the characters mirror actual people's speech, not the other way around

Furthermore, there are plenty of instances in modern Japanese literature where an author manipulates language in order to give a subset of characters a specific linguistic 'tic' that sets them apart from other characters. A great one is Naruto with his 'dattebayo'. It sets him apart from other characters and is a particle that no one used in real life before the author created it, if we only look at Naruto, we...

Even as she is pointing out that we don't actually know if women actually spoke like this at that period, and even if they did we couldn't know if women spoke like this and then the novels were written, or if the novels were written and then woman spoke like this, or if they had any relationship at all. It's purely conjecture.

I know I've said this before, but I can't believe I found these authors convincing in grad school. I accepted what she said: that the female dialect of Japanese was created, not that it arose naturally, but that it was created by novelists in the Meiji era.

Her proof? Meiji novels.

Wow, that's a major inflation of the data on the prior page: "It is noteworthy, first of all, that the gender-neutral final particles in Ukiyoburo have become gendered into either female exclusive or male-exclusive in Sanshiro." (100 years later)

No.
First: there were male and female exclusive particles in ukiyoburo
2nd: there were 14 neutral. Of those 14, 6 become gendered. That's not 50%. Hardly conclusive.

I can't make too hard of a judgment, because I've never read anything written during the Meiji era in Japanese, I doubt I could, but this certainly isn't true of modern literature. So at what point did the status switch?

This actually disagrees with other works in this volume that talk about how honorific endings are required in writing..so..? Is this just historical? She certainly doesn't frame it as such.

"Polite and honorific verb-ending forms, which formally indexed context-bound relationships between the author and the reader and between the author and the characters, eventually lost their status in the serious literary style."

Again. Examples? That would be nice.

I can't believe I found this article convincing in grad school.

first of all she said that by the 1910s plain verb endings such as -da had won out as the established literary style.

Maybe it had in the 1910s, but it certainly isn't now. And where is the evidence that this is true? She doesn't give a single example. No excerpts. No surveys. Just her feelings.

I just read the world's most rambling paragraph and am sitting back in astonishment at how my younger self found post structuralism to be convincing.

Just because you redefine commonly understood words to mean something completely different doesn't rescue you from inherently circular arguments.