Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque: Egophoricity

Abstract

Few airline passengers meet the one word question ‘Coffee?’ with a baffled stare; the question clearly means ‘Would you like some coffee?’ despite the absence of verbs and pronouns. Questions ask about the addressee or his ken and statements give information about the speaker or her ken. This pattern, which I shall call the ‘conversational presumption’, is built into the fabric of human communication; it permits languages even without verb agreement to make sparse use of pronouns. Witness Japanese genki desu ka (well COP Q) ‘Are you well?’ and genki desu (well COP) ‘I am well’. In particular, forms with inherently private evidential meaning (Wittgenstein’s ‘toothache’) are restricted to first person statements (ha ga itai desu [tooth SBJ hurt COP] ‘I have a toothache’) and second person questions (ha ga itai desu ka [tooth SBJ hurt COP Q] ‘Do you have a toothache?’); other contexts require different expressions (ha ga ita gatteiru [tooth SBJ hurt appear-PROG] ‘He (you) appears (appear) to have a toothache’.). In a 1980 paper, Austin Hale mistook the intersection of the conversational presumption and personal evidentiality in Newar as an exotic form of person agreement, which he referred to as ‘conjunct-disjunct’ and, under the influence of Nicolas Tournadre’s analysis of Lhasa Tibetan, later came to be called ‘egophoricity’ (Hill and Gawne 2017). I use the term ‘Personal evidentiality’ (equivalent to conjunct, egophoric, or participatory in descriptions of particular languages) for the marking of information as known through conscious personal involvement, e. g. ‘I am a linguist’, ‘I work in London’, etc. Since Hale’s time linguists have struggled to overcome his error. The book under review is a step forward in this struggle, but the battle is far from won. Before Hale, Edward Bendix correctly described Newar personal evidentiality as expressing “the evidential category of intentional action” (Bendix 1974: 54) and