ABSTRACT
Japanese is a language particularly rich in grammaticalized features in the social/relational domain. Any study of polite language in Japanese would reveal enormous differences in usage according to various factors, such as gender, age, dialect, educational background, context (e.g., topic of conversation, formality of setting), and degree of familiarity. Politeness can be both nonverbal and verbal. Nonverbal politeness includes bowing, physical distance, and posture. Verbal politeness in Japanese involves two dimensions, namely: (1) formality, which reflects the psychological and/or social distance between participants, and (2) honorific and humble language, which indicates respect and deference. The system of polite language in Japanese applies not only to pronouns (as in Indo-European languages), but also to verbs, adjectives, nouns, and conventional expressions. Furthermore, politeness is also marked by paralinguistic features such as intonation, as well as conversational strategies such as indirectness.
