The paper explores engagement as a linguistic category by discussing its defining characteristics. Following work by Evans and colleagues (2018a, b), we discuss issues of scope and the intersubjective distribution of information, as central to the definition of engagement. In addition, we examine the notion of access as a crucial component of engagement marking and we attempt to distinguish access from epistemic authority, which we argue is a prerequisite for the existence of engagement as a linguistic category. Both access and epistemic authority appear central to an analysis of engagement marking, as found in the literature and in the languages of this Special Issue. From an interactional point of view, engagement may be viewed as a form of “stance” (Du Bois 2007), in that it primarily positions the speech participants with respect to talked about events from the point of view of the speaker.
The present paper considers attested variation found in egophoric marking systems in order to discuss the role of such variation for the defining features of egophoric marking viz. a speech-act participant's epistemic authority subject to his/her involvement in an event. Austin Hale's (1980) pioneering description of egophoric marking in Kathmandu Newar (called "conjunct/disjunct" by Hale) has largely shaped our conception of what such systems look like, but in recent years, research on comparable systems has revealed that egophoric marking systems vary with respect to every purportedly defining feature of such systems. The one remaining variable that appears constant is the epistemic authority of the speech-act participants. When attempting to analyze and compare egophoric marking, one should consider all relevant cross-linguistic variation in order to determine what features are defeasible, and which ones are not. In this paper we explore the range of participant-roles that can be associated with egophoric marking focusing on "secondary" egophoric markers that map onto undergoers, affected participants, and the attitudes of the speech-act participants. It will become clear that these less prototypical instances of egophoric marking bridge such systems to a seemingly unrelated grammatical constructions, known as "ethical datives".
While demonstratives typically signal aspects of the spatial configuration of speech act participants and objects in the speech situation, intersubjective parameters, such as the attentional state of the interlocutor, have recently gained importance in the analysis of such forms. Several systems have been described in which the use of certain forms is conditioned by shared vs. non-shared attention towards a referent. Phenomena of this kind have recently been considered under the notion of ‘engagement’, i.e. the expression of a speaker’s assumptions about the knowledge or attention of their interlocutor (Evans et al. 2018a, b).The present study contributes to the ongoing investigation of engagement by a descriptive account of demonstratives in Kogi (Chibchan). It is argued that the use of certain (ad)nominal forms that were initially associated with addressee proximity cannot be accounted for in merely spatial terms. The paper proposes a novel analysis in terms of engagement and shows that the forms apply when a referent is in the attention of, or is known to both interlocutors. Evidence in support of this comes from elicited data as well as an interactive matching game in which attentional states of participants can be observed.
This paper discusses methods to investigate epistemic marking in Kogi, a Chibchan language of Colombia. The type of epistemic marking prominent in Kogi grammar belongs to the recently proposed category of engagement, which is concerned with signaling shared vs. non-shared access to a discourse object between the speech-act participants. This is manifested on the one hand in an (ad)nominal demonstrative that is licensed by shared visual or cognitive access to a referent, and on the other hand, in a set of verbal prefixes that reflect (a)symmetries in access to states of affairs. Given the relatively abstract meaning of epistemic markers as well as their particular context sensitivity, the study of such forms comes with certain challenges such as, for example, their elusiveness to semantic elicitation or relative scarcity in naturally occurring speech. The present study aims to circumvent these pitfalls by employing methods that constitute a middle ground between controlled elicitation and spontaneous speech, namely stimuli-based, interactional elicitation tasks, in which participants are asked to collaboratively solve a problem or develop a narrative. In addition to the description of the materials and procedures, the tasks are discussed with regard to the occurrence of engagement forms in the obtained data.
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