Abstract
AbstractSpeakers of Coastal Marind, a Papuan language of the Anim family, use a special inflectional form of the verb to signal that the state of affairs that the verb describes is outside the addressee’s current focus of attention. A central claim of the paper is that speakers use this verb form, which I call theAbsconditive, to signal that the addressee should realign their attention to achieve shared access to the state of affairs. The paper describes the function of this attentional-epistemic grammatical category and provides examples of its use, mostly drawn from video recordings of face-to-face interaction. I also contrast the Absconditive with constructions with related functions, such as the use of morphology expressing information-structural notions (narrow focus), and a verb form that appears to express shared access to a referent.
Highlights
The grammar of Coastal Marind, a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea, provides speakers with an array of inflectional options for marking a simple statement such as ‘Mother is coming’
I discuss its restriction to clauses with present time reference (Section 3.1), its use to realign the attentional focus of the addressee (Section 3.2), the lack of deictic contrast in most uses of the Absconditive, which clearly distinguishes it from the independent demonstratives (Section 3.3), and a use that seems to emphasise that the information contradicts the beliefs of the addressee (Section 3.4)
More documentation of language in use, will undoubtedly refine our understanding of these prefix series, but for I hope to have shown that looking at the Absconditive through the lens provided by the notion of engagement provides a much better descriptive framework than the uninformative “present tense” label found in Drabbe’s—in most respects brilliant—pioneering work
Summary
The grammar of Coastal Marind, a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea, provides speakers with an array of inflectional options for marking a simple statement such as ‘Mother is coming’. The Coastal Marind Absconditive expresses the addressee’s lack of attention, or lack of epistemic access, to the state of affairs conveyed by the verb This is almost a mirror image of the Presentative prefix in (1b), which primarily is found when both speaker and addressee are already attending to the referent or the situation that the sentence is about. Evans et al (2018a,b) survey a range of languages whose grammars provide “grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs” (2018a: 110), and propose that these systems can be viewed as part of the larger grammatical domain engagement It should be clear why I believe that engagement is a relevant concept for describing the Absconditive (and probably the Presentative) prefixes if one compares the sentences given in (1b–c) above with the examples that Evans et al chose as their initial illustration of the engagement notion. The grammar by Drabbe (1955) has the major advantage of a more consistent morphemic analysis, but offers few clues as to the function of the forms: Drabbe identifies the prefix series as markers of present tense (1955: 37–39) but notes that he can not find any difference in meaning between these prefixes and the other forms that he labels present tense (1955: 38)
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