Abstract
abstractEngagement systemsencodethe relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee, and are thus underpinned by our social cognitive capacities. In our first foray into engagement (Part 1), we focused on specialised semantic contrasts as found in entity-level deictic systems, tailored to the primal scenario for establishing joint attention. This second paper broadens out to an exploration of engagement at the level of events and even metapropositions, and comments on how such systems may evolve. The languages Andoke and Kogi demonstrate what a canonical system of engagement with clausal scope looks like, symmetrically assigning ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ values to speaker and addressee. Engagement is also found cross-cutting other epistemic categories such as evidentiality, for example where a complex assessment of relative speaker and addressee awareness concerns the source of information rather than the proposition itself. Data from the language Abui reveal that one way in which engagement systems can develop is by upscoping demonstratives, which normally denote entities, to apply at the level of events. We conclude by stressing the need for studies that focus on what difference it makes, in terms of communicative behaviour, for intersubjective coordination to be managed by engagement systems as opposed to other, non-grammaticalised means.
Highlights
Engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee
In Part I we introduced the notion of engagement with an initial example from Andoke, where a four-way auxiliary choice, which is a core part of the grammar and has clause-level scope, encodes the speaker’s assumptions about the accessibility of the represented proposition to speaker and/or hearer across all four logical permutations
We broaden our typological base to show that systems of engagement with clausal scope are found in several geographical hotspots – the Colombian Andes and Western Amazonia, and several parts of New Guinea
Summary
Engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. 2. Engagement and states of affairs We have already introduced one example of a language of Colombia, Andoke, with grammatical marking indicating the presumed degree of speaker and/or addressee knowledge or attention (broadly, accessibility) regarding an event, drawing on the seminal study by Landaburu (2007). The verb form nanukkú in (1a) is appropriate in a situation where the speaker claims epistemic authority (in this case related to performing the action in question) without assuming that the addressee is aware of or knows the event referred to. It could be uttered in a situation where the addressee has just asked the speaker what they are doing in another room. Meaning dimensions of epistemic marking prefixes in Kogi (after Bergqvist, 2016)
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