Re: Verbal Inflection for Formality

> How much detail are you looking for?
>
> Basically, Japanese has a few systems going.
>
> 1. Multiple verbs for multiple levels (to/from) of status - e.g. be,
> do, eat, etc have special verbs; all other verbs have particular forms
> that are used (e.g. ~ ni naru)
>
> 2. Ingroup / outgroup verbiage (e.g. give, receive, etc)
>
> 3. Several levels of inflection, from formal and long to informal and
> short; partially correlates to status and respect, partially to
> familiarity, partially to situation or listeners. Somewhat similar to
> usage in English; formal gets more passive, more indirect, adds extra
> helping verbs, etc; informal eschews those and also starts chopping
> off bits of the word.
These were the bits I was looking for really, mostly the third (verbal
inflection) rather than stem suppletive ways of marking politeness. I
was looking for a description of the morphology involved..

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