Katakana Analysis

For my analysis, I will talk about two examples スティーバンさん　contributed.

Click here for this first one. In this example, the ドン　represents a sound, maybe used for effect. I think a big reason this expression is in かたかな is because it's an onomatopoeia. Also, using かたかな gives emphasis to the word. Using かたかな makes the expression stand out. In this example, many of the loan words are in katakana (for example, トイレ and　バス). The main reason here must be because these words are not originally from the native Japanese language, but come from other languages.

I guess these words are there for the reasons we've already seen in the various Japanese textbooks - for emphasis, onomatopoeia, and loan words. It's hard to say why textbooks define katakana differently, but it must be because katakana's use is a bit ambiguous or at least difficult to define. For example, in the first picture I mentioned above, both the fact that the word is an onomatopoeia and that it is emphasized seem to be plausible reasons to use katakana. I suppose the writers of the textbooks had to look at katakana words as a whole and group them, which really is difficult.