Abstract
abstractHuman language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central to everyday communication, our knowledge of the cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce the term ‘engagement’ to refer to grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs, and describe examples of engagement systems from around the world. Engagement systems express the speaker’s assumptions about the degree to which their attention or knowledge is shared (or not shared) by the addressee. Engagement categories can operate at the level of entities in the here-and-now (deixis), in the unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), and even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). In this first paper, we introduce engagement and situate it with respect to existing work on intersubjectivity in language. We then explore the key role of deixis in coordinating attention and expressing engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic systems from those that focus on the the location of the speaker, to those that encode the attentional state of the addressee.
Highlights
As speakers of English or similar languages, we are prone to presume that the meaning-categories found in our grammar represent the essential information of a situation, and that whatever we express by more peripheral methods is just so much ‘extra stuff’
Starting a sentence with a word like certainly, as we do above, may be one of many tools we use to both concede and coerce an addressee’s point of view, but it is hardly a core component of forming a grammatical English clause. This division of labour in English and languages like it – with the grammar focusing on event structure, and pragmatic questions of intersubjective placement outsourced to more marginal parts of the system – has distorted our view of what grammar can do
We argue that many languages have grammaticalised systems for monitoring and adjusting intersubjective settings; it is this grammaticalised intersubjectivity which we refer to as engagement, in much the same way as grammaticalised time representation merits the special metalinguistic term tense
Summary
As speakers of English or similar languages, we are prone to presume that the meaning-categories found in our grammar represent the essential information of a situation, and that whatever we express by more peripheral methods is just so much ‘extra stuff’. Consider the situation where the day is dawning and the two of us, speaker and hearer, are watching the sun rise together, so the speaker can presume joint attention to this mutually accessible event This would be expressed as in (1a), using the auxiliary base b- Engag -3p l i n g r -move-3 ‘It’s the whites arriving (which I know / can witness but you can’t).’ This initial two-way contrast (shared accessibility versus speaker-only accessibility) is, in turn, part of a four-valued set of auxiliary bases (with a further subdivision of one value) whose other members deal with cases where the speaker lacks knowledge. The Andoke engagement paradigm as a 2 x 2 matrix (Landaburu, 2007, p. 30)
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