The Emotive Function of Katakana in Internet Discourse — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

The Emotive Function of Katakana in Internet Discourse

Name: Thomas Morelli
Major: Japanese
Hometown: Kenosha
Faculty Sponsor: Yan Wang
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Senior thesis

Abstract

The Emotive Function of Katakana in Internet Discourse

インターネットにおけるカタカナの感情表現の使用

My senior thesis was about the way a written script in Japanese called katakana is being used online to express emotion, a function katakana was not originally created for. Aside from preexisting research used to explain the regular use of the language and to back up my claims the research pertaining to this new usage was all collected by myself by taking examples of posts from the websites Twitter, the most used social media service in Japan, and Futaba Channel which is a Japan-only website. Using these examples I elaborated on how the script was being used in this new way and tried to explain the reasoning behind it. This also involved quite a bit of research into other aspects the language. I analyzed three different patterns I found regularly with this new usage of the script and came to a conclusion on why katakana was being used with them. I believe this work was unique in that it used current data and websites for the main part of the thesis, and that there is not much other research like it. Using as current as possible data is important for the study of language since it is continually evolving, which is why looking at discourse on the internet is such a great tool for studying exactly how it is evolving.

Poster file