Politeness Level Indicating the Acting Person in Japanese

Abstract

Japanese verbs do not have any person-number suffixes. They have words for "I", "you", "he", etc., but use them very seldom. How do they know, anyway, who is the acting person in a sentence? Besides the context, there are several devices to make this unmistakably clear. One of these devices will be studied in this paper, namely: the politeness level. Many superpolite verbs distinguish clearly whether I or somebody else is acting. They use different nouns for "my wife” and "your wife" without adding the devices for "my" or "your".