On socio-cultural conditionality of person deixis (on the Japanese language material)

In linguistics, three main types of deixis are traditionally distinguished: location (spatial), time (temporal) and person deixis. The article deals with person deixis, which is understood as an indication of a person by various linguistic means in the context of a current or recreated speech act. Within the framework of the so-called normative theory of deixis, the foundations of which were laid by C. Buhler, a number of characteristics are attributed to deixis due to representation of person deixis in world languages mainly by personal pronouns and indicators of the grammatical person category of the verb. In the theory of functional grammar by A.V. Bondarko category of person is seen as the grammatical core of the field of personality. However, a sociocultural phenomenon such as Japanese communication has a number of particular features that determine erasure, blurring of the personal frame in the syntactic design of the statement, despite the relevance of pointing to the person. The absence of a grammatical person category of the verb in the Japanese language also contributes to this state. Therefore, an indication of a person is carried out by other than traditionally distinguished means and ways, which entails deviations from the deixis characteristics, which are given in the linguistic descriptions as universal ones. In addition, person deixis means in Japanese not only indicate a person, but can encode additional information, such as, for example, the gender, age or social status of the speaker and other characteristics of the social meaning. Accounting for social characteristics, in turn, results in a pragmatic connotation of the content transmitted by person deixis. Differences in the means and methods of pointing to a person in Japanese as compared with those that were revealed during numerous studies on the material of Indo-European languages, suggest the specificity of pointing to a person in the language under consideration. Thus, the subject of this article is the specific features of Japanese person deixis, which are a reflection of the sociocultural specifics of Japanese communication. This study was conducted on the basis of the Japanese language and is not comparative in the strict sense of the word, however, the background for intermediate and final conclusions is the Russian language as the author's native one.