Egophoricity

Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically, a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs, while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages, egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world, including languages of Western China, the Andean region of South America, the Caucasus, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective, interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation.

Nick Evans, The Australian National University:
This intriguing and original volume crystallises the emerging discovery of an exciting new grammatical phenomenon turning up in recent work on a number of languages from quite distinct regions of the world – especially in the Himalayas, the Andes and in the New Guinea Highlands. Egophoricity grammaticalises the inherent epistemic asymmetries between speaker, addressee and others, differently configured in statements, questions and represented thought. As such this book is deeply important to a range of fields interested in how we humans use language to manage, maintain or transcend the boundaries between individual and collective knowledge.