Complexity in Egophoric Marking: From Agents to Attitude Holders

2021

Front. Commun.

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From the point of view of everyday talk and especially, casual conversation, it is obvious that language use is highly perspectivized with a clear focus on the speech-act participants. This fact is supported by observations regarding the pervasiveness of egophoric pronouns and the frequent use of the modal particles ju and väl in spoken Swedish. The paper demonstrates how egophoric pronouns, modal particles, and mental verbs are used to signal the epistemic perspective of the speech-act participants, i.e., when the knowledge and attention of the speech-act participants are at stake. These formally distinct resources show patterns of co-distribution that permit an analysis of forms in terms of how they signal shared/private access to events from the perspective of the speaker and the addressee.

Section: Egophoricity and Epistemic Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Egophoricity and Perspective: A View From Spoken Swedish

2021

Front. Commun.

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“…Reflections of the speaker's territory of information and his/her epistemic authority over this territory can be found in distinct areas of grammar, such as Japanese clause-final particles, evidentials (Grzech 2016), and person markers (Schultze-Berndt 2017), to name just a few. To these we may add modal particles and their functional equivalents (Bergqvist and Knuchel 2017; see directly below).…”

Section: Egophoric 'Territories Of Information'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Swedish modal particles as markers of engagement: Evidence from distribution and frequency

2020

Folia Linguistica

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The paper analyses the Swedish modal particles ju and väl as markers of engagement. This analysis finds support in the distribution and frequency of ju and väl in a corpus of spoken Swedish along with an examination of existing accounts concerning the semantics of the investigated forms. Engagement encodes differences in the distribution of knowledge and/or attention between the speaker and the addressee, where the basic semantic contrast consists of the speaker asserting an assumption about the addressee’s knowledge of/attention to an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker. Ju and väl are paradigmatically contrastive in signaling shared access to an event from the point of view of the speaker, or the addressee: ju signals shared access to an event and at the same time places the epistemic authority with the speaker, and väl signals shared access to an event, placing the epistemic authority with the addressee. Analytical support for ju and väl as markers of engagement comes from the distribution of both forms with first person (jag), second person (du), and generic (man) subject pronouns.

“…Such cognitive accessibility is typically rooted in activating a referent or a state of affairs by previous mention. Lastly, the term access has also been used in connection with another epistemic category, namely 'egophoricity', which signals "epistemic access" to events subject to the involvement of the speech act participants (see Floyd et al 2018, Bergqvist & Knuchel 2017.…”

Section: Claiming Access and Accessibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Explorations of Engagement: Introduction

Knuchel

2019

Open Linguistics

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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.