Linguistic Categories, Language Description and Linguistic Typology

The topic of the paper is an analysis of the debated notion of the category ‘pronoun’ in East and Southeast Asian languages, with a special focus on Japanese. After a description of the main aspects of the notion of ‘person’ as a grammatical category, the focus is devoted to personal pronouns in general and then to personal pronouns in East and Southeast Asian languages. Special attention is devoted to Japanese personal pronouns, taking into account the Emancipatory Pragmatics approach.