THE FEATURES OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE
Problem. In the article at hand the particular features of Japanese as an agglutinating Ural-Altaic language are presented. Concerning its grammatical structure Japanese is depicted as a topic prominent language, which bears close resemblance to Korean. Results. A specific feature of marking personal deixis is the differentiated Japanese honorific system which allows speakers to mark respect and submissiveness. The use of honorific markers helps speakers to avoid face-threatening acts. Honorific markers can be realized as partner- or object-related honorifics. Local deixis in Japanese has a triadic structure according to the so-called Ko-So-A- system. By applying the Ko- morpheme the speaker refers to an object, the position of which is self-determined by the speaker. The So- morpheme refers to an object close to the addressee. The use of the A- morpheme finally refers to an object which is out of reach of the current speech context. Conclusion. The embedding of relative clauses in Japanese is marked its position in front of the relating noun. The nucleus of a sentence is as a general rule not represented in the relative clause. Such a representation only occurs if the nucleus appears as a genitive attribute or as a complement of the postpositional syntagm.