Explorations of Engagement: Introduction

Abstract

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.

Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: Investigating the codevelopment and coevolution of language and social cognition.

“…Trevarthen (1979, p. 347) concedes that "intersubjectivity is not a graceful word, but it does specify the linking of subjects who are active in transmitting their understanding to each other." Evans et al (2018a) highlight the importance of intersubjectivity in the context of human language and communication: "Achieving intersubjectivity thus lies at the heart of how human communication systems evolved" (p. 3; see also Bergqvist & Knuchel, 2019;Verhagen, 2007).…”

“…However, mental-state verbs pose high metarepresentational demands (e.g., consider the difference between "Sally knows the marble is in the basket" vs. "Sally thinks the marble is in the basket"), without being more important for successful communication (or social navigation) than other parts of language. As Evans et al (2018aEvans et al ( , 2018bBergqvist & Knuchel, 2019) have recently pointed out, human languages offer rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors through grammatical categories such as deixis and evidentiality-what they call the grammar of engagement.…”

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

“…{confirming} Shi-/shaare used to signal the speaker's acknowledgment of the addressee as primary knower, but at the same time encodes the speaker's assertion (without reduced certainty) of a talked-about event. In Kogi, we thus find two semantic parameters that pertain to the notion of engagement; firstly, there is the parameter of accessibility (see Bergqvist and Knuchel 2019), which can be shared or nonshared between the speaker and the addressee, secondly, there is the notion of epistemic authority, which warrants the separation between na-/niand sha-/shiinto speaker and addressee-perspective forms. This separation foreshadows the notion of egophoric marking below, which encodes the involvement of the speechact participants and the resulting epistemic authority from such involvement (see Section 3.1).…”

“…As stated in Section 2, engagement signals the assumed sharedness/nonsharedness between the speech-act participants with respect to any aspect of epistemicity, such as belief, perceptual/cognitive access, and involvement (Bergqvist and Knuchel 2019;Bergqvist and Kittilä 2020). While ju and (to a lesser extent), väl, have been defined by their function to qualify the truth content of a proposition (e.g., Aijmer 1977Aijmer , 1996Eriksson 1988;Teleman et al 1999;cf.…”

Demonstratives can train spatial perspective taking: The case of Spanish

“…Diessel argues that coordinating speaker-listener joint attention is one of the most basic functions of language, which also links demonstratives to social cognition. Building on extensive typological work by Diessel (1999Diessel ( , 2006 and colleagues (2018a, 2018b;Bergqvist & Knuchel, 2019), I have recently argued that demonstratives are a lynchpin for the development of social cognition, training young children in spatial perspective taking (Rubio-Fernandez, 2020).…”