Social asymmetries in online personal ads in Japanese: Discursive construction of desirable personae, bodies, and practices

摘要: The Internet is increasingly becoming a key medium through which people establish social contacts and form interpersonal relationships. In particular, online dating websites are gaining popularity rapidly expanding around the world. This study explores discourse that constitutes practices of deai-kee-saito ‘encounter-oriented sites’ in Japanese, as observed three major personal ad websites, namely 1) Ekisaito furenzu ‘Excite Friends’, 2) Match.com, 3) Yahoo!Japan paasonaruzu ‘Yahoo!Japan Personals’. It focuses on ways self-advertisers express their socio-sexual desires describe ideal partners relationships, analyzes them with respect to reproduction asymmetries. More specifically, it examines discursive construction kinds personae (personality characteristics) bodies (physical features) advertisers aged 20-29 wish future partners, well (activities actions) they engage what do for and/or envisioned interactions. Out 1200 ads collected from these total 463 identified target-gender-explicit analyzed at lexical, morphosyntactic, phrasal, clausal, sentential levels. pays close attention linguistic resources utilized articulation desirability, textual formation addresser(advertiser)addressee(ad reader) including adjectives, nouns, verbal phrases, person references, desideratives, conditionals, formula yoroshiku/o-negai shimasu ‘Thank you advance’. also para-linguistic resources, such emoticons,