DOES THE CATEGORY OF PERSON EXIST IN JAPANESE?

Abstract

It is well-known that the category of person is considered one of the main grammatical categories of verb. The European linguistic tradition singled this category out from its beginning. Some European and American grammars of Japanese recognized the grammatical category of person (B.Y. Chamberlain, A. Rose-Inness, T. Navron-Voytinskaya). However the categories of etiquette (politeness) are mixed with person. Japanese has the developed system of the designation of social attitudes between the speaker and other persons (interlocutors or objects of speech). The cause of the confusion is the influence of the grammatical system of the European languages on the investigators. However the opposition of the forms of 1st person and 2nd person exists in the imperative, and such forms are numerous: kake ‘write!’ (rude), o-kaki kudasai ‘write!’ (polite), kakoo ‘let us write’. The opposition of personal pronouns of all the persons exist too although they are not very common in Japanese.