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Japanese, well known for its elaborate system of honorific speech, also exhibits pronoun avoidance, [5] to such an extent that Maynard suggests that Japanese “lacks a pronominal system”. [6] Pronoun avoidance may extend to first and third person pronouns as well.
Japanese exhibits pronoun avoidance, meaning that using pronouns is often too direct in Japanese, and considered offensive or strange. [6] One would not use pronouns for oneself, 私 ( watashi , 'I') , or for another, あなた ( anata , 'you') , but instead would omit pronouns for oneself, and call the other person by name:
Japanese pronouns (代名詞, daimeishi) are words in the Japanese language used to address or refer to present people or things, where present means people or things that can be pointed at. The position of things (far away, nearby) and their role in the current interaction (goods, addresser, addressee , bystander) are features of the meaning ...
Japanese uses honorific constructions to show or emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank. The choice of pronoun used, for example, will express the social relationship between the person speaking and the person being referred to, and Japanese often avoids pronouns entirely in favor of more explicit titles or kinship terms.
In linguistics, an honorific (abbreviated HON) is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. . Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical ...
Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages. In a few cases new verbs are created by appending -ru (〜る) suffix to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word.
While this practice did not affect the non-Chinese countries as much since their variants of zhèn (朕) and other terms were generally imported loanwords, the practice of polite avoidance of pronouns nevertheless spread throughout East Asia. (For more information, see: Japanese pronouns, Korean pronouns, and Vietnamese pronouns.)
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. [1]