The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification

• DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2017.21
• Publication Date: 2017-11-06T03:44:38Z
• Authors: NICHOLAS EVANS; HENRIK BERGQVIST; LILA SAN ROQUE
• Keywords: Deixis; Intersubjectivity; Exemplification; Joint Attention; Evidentiality

abstract Human language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central everyday communication, our knowledge cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce term ‘engagement’ refer grammaticalised for encoding relative mental directedness speaker addressee towards an entity or state affairs, describe examples engagement systems from around world. Engagement express speaker’s assumptions about degree which their attention shared (or not shared) by addressee. categories can operate at level entities in here-and-now (deixis), unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). first paper, situate it respect existing work on intersubjectivity language. We then explore key role deixis coordinating expressing engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic those focus location speaker, encode