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Which languages apart from Japanese, Korean and Javanese encode systematically the relationships between speaker, hearer and referent by means of grammar markers and special sets of vocabulary?

hippietrail
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meireikei
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    In Manchu there are about 20 words for 'I' depending on who the speaker and the listener(s) are. Generally speaking, this feature of marking politeness is the areal feature of most of the languages of Pacific Asia. – Yellow Sky Dec 26 '14 at 23:17
  • most of the languages of pacific asia? would it be still most of the languages of this area if only grammatical realisation would count? – meireikei Dec 27 '14 at 00:29
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    Does the choice of personal pronouns according to social relationships count as "grammatical realisation"? – Yellow Sky Dec 27 '14 at 00:45
  • I do not know, as limited as i know grammatical realisation is either realization by syntax or realization by morphology. as i understand it, pronouns are lexical realizations. – meireikei Dec 27 '14 at 00:51
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    In Javanese the realisation of social relationships is also purely lexical. You need to formulate your questions better before asking them. – Yellow Sky Dec 27 '14 at 00:56
  • how sure are you about javanese? – meireikei Dec 27 '14 at 00:56
  • Are you kidding? Have you ever read a grammar of Javanese? It's like Malay, no inflectional morfology, only the choice of words shows social relationships. – Yellow Sky Dec 27 '14 at 01:18
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    wikipedia says: " There is a complex system of verb affixes to express differences of status in subject and object" – meireikei Dec 27 '14 at 01:23
  • That's not true. – Yellow Sky Dec 27 '14 at 02:40
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    Would languages with a T-V distinction qualify? To a lesser extent, what about majestic plural? Heck, what about how in formal English people seem to prefer Latin roots over Germanic? – acattle Dec 28 '14 at 18:07
  • Also, I have some experience with Korean and the phenomenon you're describing seems to be morphological, not grammatical. I.e. the inclusion or exclusion of the 시 particle does not change the grammatic structure of the sentence. – acattle Dec 28 '14 at 18:10
  • Morphology is not part of grammar anymore? -: – hippietrail Jan 22 '15 at 06:26
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    @hippietrail Depends how you define grammar. I've seen people define it as syntax and I've seen people define it as morphosyntax. In retrospect, morphosyntax is probably a more common definition and I had simply suffered a brain fart. – acattle Jan 22 '15 at 11:54
  • Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech – charlotte Jan 24 '15 at 22:50

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Various Australian Aboriginal languages have grammatical encoding of the kinship relationships between speaker/hearer/referent.

See: Blythe, Joe (2013), Preference organization driving structuration: Evidence from Australian Aboriginal interaction for pragmatically motivated grammaticalization. Language, 89:4, pp. 883-919.

Miztli
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johnbasil
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