Language and Character Identity: A Study of First-Person Pronouns in a Corpus of Science Fiction Anime Dialogue

Abstract

Like a number of other Asian languages, Japanese is a language with a large number of pronouns. These do not vary according to the grammatical role of the referent/s (e.g. subject, object, etc.) but rather index social meanings. This thesis investigates how the indexical meanings commonly associated with Japanese first-person pronouns (1PPs) are recontextualised in the dialogue of anime television series to construct characters and convey aspects of their identity. This is a mixed-methods study which combines statistical analysis and quantitative frequency-based analyses of word lists and collocation with qualitative analyses of concordances and scenes to examine a newly constructed corpus, the corpus of Science-Fiction Anime dialogue (SciFAn corpus), which is comprised of the dialogue from five science-fiction anime television series. Combining corpus linguistic methodologies with a sociolinguistic approach, this study draws primarily on the sociolinguistic concept of indexicality in the discussion of the target forms (i.e. 1PPs) and their relationship to characterisation. Previous studies of Japanese 1PPs, particularly those examining anime dialogue, mainly discuss their usage in relation to construction of gender identity. The link between 1PP use and gender is examined using descriptive statistics and statistical tests. The results show that gender is a significant factor for the use of some 1PPs but not others. As a follow-up, this study shows that the use of 1PPs can convey other aspects of a character’s identity in addition to gender, such as their personality traits and presentational personae. Additionally, examinations of shifts or switches between different 1PPs by an individual character show that different 1PPs are used in the data examined to convey the fluidity of character identity as well as their complexity as characters