Heh. It was twenty years ago, I'm probably confabulating more than I'm recalling.

To pick an example... I remember observing that both my family and hers had highly specific ways of communicating the difference between a demand, a request, and a question, but the mechanisms had almost nothing in common. In my family, if it was phrased as an interrogative it was either a question or a demand, but never a request. and I was expected to recognize demands by context. In her family, it seemed everything was an interrogative; whatever the cue was, I never really figured it out.