1. Introduction

Engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. While many linguistic elements can be deployed to express intersubjective meanings of this kind (e.g., asserting that I know something and you don’t), the possibility that grammatical systems can be built around such values – themselves fundamental to social cognition – has barely been explored and remains an open question. 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 (speaker only, hearer only, both, or neither). From there we passed to a discussion of the broader question of intersubjectivity in language – not necessarily grammaticalised – and then back to the ‘primal scene’ of attentional coordination as it is played out through the use of deictics to coordinate attention to objects. We placed special emphasis on systems like Turkish or Jahai, in which attentional coordination appears to be the primary function of at least one demonstrative.

In this second part of the paper, we return to systems where the scope is the proposition or clause rather than the entity or NP. We also broaden our typological base to show that systems of engagement with clausal scope are found in several geographical hotspots – particularly the Colombian Andes and Western Amazonia, and several parts of New Guinea. In §2 we examine two systems from South America, Kogi and Kakataibo, which resemble Andoke in taking the event as a whole, rather than an individual object, as the level at which grammaticalised engagement coordinates mutual attention. In §3, we examine how engagement can interact with other knowledge-related categories, for example, by taking not just the proposition itself but the evidence for it within its scope. Having worked our way upwards in terms of scope levels, from demonstratives (entities) through basic propositions (states of affairs) to meta-propositions (certain evidentials), we show the interconnections between them in §4, by examining a language (Abui) which has coerced the rich set of speaker- vs. addressee-based contrasts in its demonstrative system into use at different grammatical levels (interclausal marker, clause-final marker); in the process it has developed a set of engagement markers from more basic deictic contrasts. We conclude in §5 by drawing together the threads of these various systems, suggesting some directions in which a more comprehensive typology of engagement can be developed in future research.

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 (Reference Landaburu, Guentchéva and Landaburu2007). We now examine in detail two further languages where engagement has scope over clauses / states of affairs. In §2.1, we turn to Kogi, an unrelated Colombian language, which organises the four-way choice of engagement values into two sets of two, defined by a contrast between speaker-perspective and addressee-perspective. In §2.2 we look at Kakataibo, which also clearly manifests contrasts between speaker-focused and addressee-focused evidence, but in a way that is structurally less neat than either Andoke or Kogi.

3. Engagement, evidence, and other epistemic categories

In the preceding section we have focused on the expression of accessibility and knowledge as either present or absent across speech act participants, with this mental directedness portrayed as either particular to speaker or hearer, or shared between them. However, we cannot stop there, as additional qualities of knowledge (for example, source and certainty) may also be incorporated with engagement-type values. Here we discuss some examples of how the more classic knowledge-related category of evidentiality, and to some extent those of epistemic modality and mirativity, can combine with the grammaticalised marking of engagement. In certain cases we can view these systems as metapropositional operators, where attention is coordinated not necessarily towards an event itself, but rather to the evidence for it. This represents a similar shift in level as that from entity (typically, the province of demonstratives in the noun phrase) to state of affairs (typically, the province of verbal operators in the clause), as discussed previously.

Evidentiality is conservatively defined as ‘grammaticised information source’ (Aikhenvald, Reference Aikhenvald2004). Typically, evidential morphemes specify the kind of evidence that an assertion is based on, for example, whether the event was seen to happen, or is being reported from hearsay. More rarely, evidentials may take scope over a referent (e.g., stating that an entity is known about through hearsay) rather than a state of affairs (see, e.g., Aikhenvald, Reference Aikhenvald2015; Gutiérrez & Matthewson, Reference Gutiérrez, Matthewson and Bogal-Allbritten2012; Hanks, Reference Hanks1990; Jacques & Lahaussois, Reference Jacques and Lahaussois2014; San Roque, Reference San Roque2008).

For some constructions in a language that marks an event like ‘peccaries crossed the path here’ with a perceptual evidential, there is a metapropositional operator, representing the epistemic commitment of perception, which takes the basic proposition in its scope. Exactly how this epistemic commitment is best represented for individual morphemes and languages is an interesting problem – at one extreme (e.g., Fleck, Reference Fleck2007; Speas, Reference Speas2004) are analyses that treat the epistemic commitment as a (fully tensed) proposition with an identifiable perceiver-argument (I saw that …), at the other extreme (see, e.g., San Roque, Reference San Roque2015) are underspecified representations that do not anchor the information source to any particular deictic centre (e.g., ‘through visual evidence’). For present purposes, our main goal is to show that these metapropositions of evidence can themselves be modulated according to the same categories of engagement that apply to propositions.

Studies of evidentiality have usually focused on the speaker as an experiencer of evidence, and it certainly seems to be the case that evidential markers tend to be used to express the speaker’s perspective. As a general rule, we make claims about our own evidence for the things we say. However, it has long been known that evidential morphology can also represent non-speaker perspectives. For example, questions typically take the evidential perspective of the addressee (Aikhenvald, Reference Aikhenvald2004; San Roque, Floyd, & Norcliffe, 2017), while third person narratives may be at least partly told from the evidential perspective of a central protagonist (see examples in Brugman & Macaulay, Reference Brugman and Macaulay2015). Certain languages appear to have taken this ability to represent the evidence of others a step further, and encode not one but two evidential perspectives simultaneously: that of both the speaker and the hearer. While such systems have been described (or at least sketched) for several different languages, our understanding of them is still in its infancy, and, with some exceptions, little material is available on how such distinctions are operationalised in discourse. We limit ourselves here to outlining a few of the known contrasts, looking first at several languages that appear to make specific claims about the nature of an addressee’s evidence.

Several languages of New Guinea, including Foe (Rule, Reference Rule1977), Wola (Sillitoe, Reference Sillitoe2010), and Pole (Rule, Reference Rule1977), are described as encoding whether an information source is shared between speaker and hearer, or exclusive to one of them (see also San Roque & Loughnane, 2012a, 2012b). Foe (Rule, Reference Rule1977) has a rich evidential system in independent clauses that distinguishes up to five information source categories (participatory, visual, non-visual sensory, inferred, assumed) across four tenses (present, near past, far past, future), three moods (indicative, customary, abilitative) and two sentence types (declarative and interrogative). These evidentials reflect a single perspective, typically that of the speaker in statements and the addressee in questions.

However, in nominalised clauses, an additional distinction is introduced into the participatory/visual evidential paradigm: whether or not the addressee witnessed the event or situation in question. Thus, Rule (1977, p. 97) describes a set of nominalisers used for a “fact known to speaker but unseen by person spoken to” as opposed to events “seen by both speaker and person spoken to” (see Table 2). Nominalisers also have special forms to indicate non-visual sensory and inferred evidence, but for these suffixes the addressee’s (presumed) perspective is not specified.

Examples of the contrastive far past nominalisers -ira and -bo’owa (as used in the formation of a relative clause) are shown in (10a) and (10b), respectively. While Rule does not provide details of context, we can assume that in (10a) only the speaker witnessed or was otherwise involved in the killing of the men long ago, whereas in (10b), both speaker and addressee saw the pig being killed:

1. (10) a. amena gahaye hü-ira bi hüyoga-bi’ae

   ?men previously hit/strike-fp.kts.nmz ?here bury-fp.ptcy

   ‘The men who were killed a long time ago, we buried here.’

   (Rule, Reference Rule1977, p. 97, gloss added)

2. b. nami davi hü-bo’owa to’ae

   pig 2.days.away hit/strike-fp.ssa.nmz ?this

   ‘This is the pig which was killed two days ago.’

   (Rule, Reference Rule1977, p. 97, gloss added)

The Engan language Pole uses a special marker on main verbs when referring to past events that both the speaker and addressee saw (Rule, Reference Rule1977). Another Engan language, Wola, has a more complex system of evidential contrasts in independent clauses. According to Sillitoe’s (2010) analysis, in the near and far past tenses Wola contrasts five kinds of speaker/addressee evidence:

1. i. both speaker and hearer witness [or participate in] ^{Footnote 6}

2. ii. either speaker or hearer witnesses [or participates in]

3. iii. hearer did not witness but heard of previously

4. iv. speaker did not witness

5. v. neither speaker nor hearer witness

Sillitoe (Reference Sillitoe2010) outlines how persuasion in Wola society is only regarded as effective if the status of propositions can be epistemically upgraded, through conversation and praxis, from the ‘witnessed by speaker’ to the ‘witnessed by speaker and addressee’ categories. Understanding how this epistemic distribution interacts with evidentials, he argues, is crucial for development workers in countries like Papua New Guinea: only by understanding the operation of grammatical markers of who knows what can they establish plausibility and trust in the message they wish to convey:

In the evidential systems found in the New Guinea Highlands, markers that indicate awareness of the addressee’s visual experience, or lack of it, thus appear to be especially prominent. This suggests the comparative ease of assessing whether or not an addressee was an eyewitness of some event, as opposed to more ‘hidden’ mental processes such as inference and assumption (see also San Roque et al., Reference San Roque, Floyd and Norcliffe2017). The Papuan language Duna (which neighbours the Engan language family) shows a spin on this tendency by including an inflection (-noko ~ -naoko) that does not make a definitive claim about the addressee’s visual experience, but suggests that he or she could have seen something that the speaker already knows about. An example is shown in (11). The (hypothetical) context is that Speaker A has asked B if they went to the market, and B has said they did, in company with another person (Mary). Speaker A finds this surprising, as she saw Mary but not Speaker B. Speaker B asserts that nevertheless they were there in plain view.

1. (11) A: ko no na-ke-ya, Mari no ke-o.

   2sg 1sg neg-see-neg psn 1sg see-pfv

   ‘You I didn’t see, Mary I saw.’

   B: neya=nia, no ngo- naoko .

   not=assert 1sg go-pot.obs

   ‘No, I went (you could have seen me).’

Utterances marked with this inflection are often functionally interpreted as questions concerning what the addressee has seen (San Roque, Reference San Roque2008). In (12) this implicit question (‘did you see?’) is made explicit. In this hypothetical context, the speaker is relatively certain that the addressee would have walked past the burned school building in order to reach the place where they are now talking.

1. (12) skul-anda khira- noko , ke-o=pe.

   school-encl burn-pot.obs see-pfv=q

   ‘The school burned, did you see it?’

In some instances the Duna ‘potential observation’ inflection thus appears to instruct the addressee to reflect on and perhaps to talk about their visual experience (see also San Roque, Reference San Roque2015). It may be that this is one of the important pragmatic functions of addressee-oriented visual evidentials more generally.

Outside of New Guinea, evidential systems that include a contrast between exclusive speaker knowledge as opposed to inclusive, shared knowledge have been briefly described for several languages of South America, such as Jaqaru (Hardman, Reference Hardman, Chafe and Nichols1986) and Southern Nambikuara (Kroeker, Reference Kroeker2001). For example, according to existing analyses Southern Nambikuara distinguishes between ‘individual’ (speaker-based) and ‘collective’ (speaker + hearer-based) observation, using the suffix -na ² in the first case and -ti ² tu ³ in the second (subject to different tense distinctions). Compare: wa ³ kon ³ na ² la ² ‘He worked today (I saw it, but you didn’t)’ (Kroeker, Reference Kroeker2001, p. 63) vs. wa ³ kon ³ tait ² ti ² tu ³ wa ² ‘He worked (we both saw it)’ (Lowe, Reference Lowe, Dixon and Aikhenvald1999, p. 276). More recently, a related contrast has been discussed for the Tibeto-Burman language Kurtöp (Hyslop, Reference Hyslop2014).

The evidential markers discussed so far are described as encoding a specific kind of information source (e.g., direct observation) that (the speaker claims) an addressee has for an event. Contrasts relevant to engagement can also be embedded within what have been analysed as evidential systems in other ways, without identifying the exact nature of the address’s evidence. For example, according to Willett (1991, pp. 162–165), evidentials of Southeastern Tepehuan mark (i) the information source of the speaker and, in the reported category only, (ii) whether (the speaker claims that) the proposition is old or new knowledge for the addressee. The particle sap is used for “reported evidence previously unknown to the hearer” (13), whereas sac is used for reported evidence where “the speaker reminds the hearer of information he already knows the hearer is aware of” (14). Willett notes that sac is much less frequent than sap in both conversation and folklore narratives, suggesting that it may be a situationally and pragmatically marked choice.

1. (13) Oidya-’-ap gu-m tat. Jimi-a’ sap para

   go.with-fut-2sg art-2sg father, go-fut reu to

   Vódamtam cavuimuc.

   Mezquital tomorrow

   ‘(You should) accompany your father. He says he’s going to Mezquital tomorrow.’

   (Willett, Reference Willett1991, example (465))

2. (14) Va-jɨ́pir gu-m bí na-p sac tu-jugui-a’.

   rlz-get.cold art-2sg food sub-2sg rek exp-eat-fut

   ‘Your food is already cold. (You said) you were going to eat.’

   (Willett, Reference Willett1991, example (471))

An important thing to note in the Tepehuan case is that, whereas the epistemic channel by which the speaker gained their knowledge is explicitly identified as reported, that of the addressee is unspecified. In this respect, the assessment of evidential source as between speaker and addressee is less clearly symmetric than in such examples as Foe. Rather, the assessment of addressee knowledge seems to be straying into the (embattled) territory of mirativity, the marking of knowledge as new or unexpected, as already mentioned in relation to Kakataibo, above. We are yet to note a fully-fledged grammatical system that paradigmatically distinguishes (a)symmetric combinations of mirativity and engagement (e.g., with such specifications as ‘this is news to both of us’ versus ‘this is old news for you, but news to me’). However, the potential for a language to have dedicated addressee-oriented mirative markers (‘this is news for you!’) has received more attention of late (e.g., Hengeveld & Olbertz, Reference Hengeveld and Olbertz2012; Mexas, Reference Mexas2016; see also Gossner, Reference Gossner1994), and an interest in the general problem goes back at least to discussions of the ‘hot news’ use of the English perfect by McCoard (Reference McCoard1978) and McCawley (Reference McCawley1981), of the type Malcolm X has just been assassinated. This suggests that the newness of knowledge of some state of affairs may be coded independently for speaker and hearer in some grammars.

To take a different approach again, Hintz and Hintz (Reference Hintz and Hintz2017) describe how in South Conchucos Quechua the category of ‘mutual knowledge’ between speaker and addressee actually has a dedicated marker (the morpheme -cha:) within the evidential system. The exact nature of the source for this mutual knowledge can be quite varied, so there is a focus on the end state of shared awareness, rather than on the way this knowledge was acquired. (This could even be interpreted as a non-mirative marker in relation to speaker and addressee.) They also describe the evidential system of another variety, Sihuas Quechua, where an ‘individual’ vs. ‘mutual’ contrast is available for all evidential contrasts, symmetrically organised so that -i indicates ‘individual’ and -a ‘mutual’. Summarising the interaction of evidence type and its epistemic distribution, they conclude:

The South Conchucos Quechua case shows similarities to Kogi, but in the Quechua variety this category is marked in contrast to evidential values such as ‘reported’, rather than being part of a paradigm that deals primarily with epistemic (a)symmetry.

Like Andoke and Kogi, all of the languages discussed above have developed morphemes that encode a range of epistemic configurations between speaker and hearer, but intertwined with the evidence for a proposition rather than simply for the proposition itself. Communicatively they can be used for such functions as to remind the addressee of shared knowledge and experience, to highlight the speaker’s more exclusive access to a particular event, to acknowledge or direct the addressee’s attention to relevant evidence, or to confirm the status of information as mutually known and agreed upon.

As has been extensively discussed and disputed in the literature, there is a close relationship between the semantic domains of information source and certainty, and thus, the grammatical categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality (e.g., Aikhenvald, Reference Aikhenvald2004; Chafe & Nichols, Reference Chafe and Nichols1986; Palmer Reference Palmer2001). Similarly as for evidentials in Foe and other languages, languages may offer options for a speaker to encode whether an epistemic modal value (e.g., certain, probable) is assumed to be shared by the addressee.

One example of this is found in the language Yurakaré (Gipper Reference Gipper2011, Reference Gipper2015). Yurakaré has two morphemes, =ya and =laba, both of which indicate that “the speaker considers the proposition to be possibly or probably true” (Gipper, Reference Gipper2015). The difference between them is that the ‘intersubjective’ =ya is used with assertions where the speaker expects the addressee to share his or her belief, whereas the ‘subjective’ =laba does not express any assumptions concerning the addressee’s state of mind. Gipper (Reference Gipper2015) describes how this difference in meaning has consequences for the distribution of the two markers: intersubjective =ya is typically found in situations of ‘symmetric’ knowledge, where both speaker and addressee have equal access to the information upon which the judgement is based. Her findings are based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of a video corpus of approximately 5.25 hours of (mostly dyadic) conversation. An example is shown in (15), where two speakers discuss the state of the lagoon in their village.

1. (15) Yurakaré [160906_conv]

   M: ((turns his head, chin-points to the lagoon outside))

   ujmanaj tishi kadyimta (.) tajudawa=

   ujwa-ma=naja tishilë

   look-imp.sg=new.situation now

   ka-dyimta-ø ta-kudawa

   3sg.obj-subside-3sg.sbj 1pl.poss-lagoon

   ‘Look, the water in our lagoon has subsided.’

   P: =të bij:[binta dyimta kompadre yosse]

   të bij~binta dyimta-ø kompadre yosse

   intj ints~strong subside-3sg.sbj compadre(sp) again

   ‘Yes, it has subsided very much again.’

   M: [të::j] (0.7)

   të

   intj

   ‘Yes.’

   P: namashtay tajudawa yosse

   nama-shta-ø= ya ta-kudawa yosse

   dry-fut-3sg.sbj=intsubj 1pl.poss=lagoon again

   ‘Probably our lagoon will dry out again.’

By contrast, the subjective marker =laba is commonly used in both symmetric and asymmetric contexts, as the addressee’s knowledge state is not at issue. An example with an asymmetric context is shown in (16), where the addressee has superior access to the information in question: the epistemic perspectives of speaker and addressee are disparate, not shared, and the intersubjective marker =ya would not be appropriate:

1. (16) Yurakaré [290906_convI]

   A: batamlab tishil na loma alta(chi) ((gaze to addressee)) (.)

   bata-m= laba tishilё naa loma alta=chi

   go.fut-2sg.sbj=subj now dem Loma Alta=dir

   ‘You are going to Loma Alta today, I think?’

   E: nijtala

   nijta=la

   neg=comm

   ‘No.’

Gipper (Reference Gipper2015) further notes (among other findings) that =ya is used comparatively more frequently than =laba in ‘agreeing responses’, where the speaker agrees with what has just been said, and (unlike =laba) is never used in disagreeing responses. She argues that, as an intersubjective marker, =ya is highly compatible with agreeing responses because these are situations where “a shared epistemic perspective is explicitly expressed”. By the same token, =ya is not appropriate to disagreeing responses, where the epistemic perspectives of speaker and addressee are explicitly at odds.

A further example of engagement combined with epistemic modality is found in the Tibeto-Burman language Kinnauri (Saxena, Reference Saxena, Johanson and Utas2000). In this case, the copula ni expresses contrastive values of speaker and addressee certainty, being used where the speaker is confident about what they are asserting, against the addressee’s perceived doubts. In (17), to would be used “when Sonam is either a family member of the speaker, or is presently with the speaker. Du is used when Sonam is not a family member of the speaker, nor is … in physical proximity to the speaker. Ni is used if the hearer has some doubts about Sonam being a good person and the speaker knows that she is a good person” (Saxena, Reference Saxena, Johanson and Utas2000, p. 473). While the first two copula forms contrast different degrees of authority / epistemic access on the part of the speaker, the third form combines an authoritative positive modal assessment by the speaker with an assumption that the addressee does not share this assessment.

1. (17) Sonam dam to / du / ni

   [proper.name] good be1:pres / be2:pres / be3:pres

   ‘Sonam is good.’

Overall, then, various additional qualities of knowledge (evidence, oldness/newness, certainty) can be expressed not only in regard to a single perspective, but also in regard to both speaker and hearer, and/or as a relation between them. There is no reason to assume that the expression of engagement is limited to these specific qualities, but we can rather expect that many other aspects of the mental directedness of interlocutors can be grammaticalised (§5). At the same time, however, we note that it is very unusual to find a comprehensive grammatical system of engagement and evidential (etc.) contrasts. That is, the full range of logical possibilities (e.g., speaker saw the event, hearer saw the event, both saw it, neither saw it; speaker inferred the event, hearer inferred … etc.) is rarely, if ever, morphologically differentiated within a single paradigm. This rarity of bidimensional systems may reflect the regular correlation, in most situations, between accessibility and evidence: direct access allows direct evidential reading, lack of direct access means that an assertion is founded on some form of evidence other than current mutual accessibility.

4. Engagement, level-shifting, and diachrony

Part of our rationale in progressing from demonstratives through engagement markers operating at clausal level, and on to markers with evidence/certainty in their scope, has been that the same processes of mutual coordination are at work, whatever the level in terms of syntactic or semantic structures. Up to this point, however, we have not examined languages where this connection is made clear. But we now pass to a Papuan language, Abui (Kratochvil, Reference Kratochvil2011a, Reference Kratochvil, Yap, Grunow-Hårsta and Wrona2011b), which illustrates the connections remarkably clearly thanks to the way it deploys its demonstratives with various levels of syntactic scope – a way somewhat reminiscent of how some Australian languages deploy case-suffixes at various syntactic levels (embedded NP, NP at clause level, embedded clause) with differential semantic effects; see also Schapper and San Roque (2011) concerning clause-level demonstratives in other Timor-Alor-Pantar languages.

We have already surveyed, in §5 of Part I, an interesting system of basic demonstratives in Abui, which recombines the proximal vs. medial distinction with both speaker and addressee anchor-points. In doing so, the language draws on two sets, a ‘basic’ set which most commonly functions adnominally and situates individual entities, and an ‘adverbial’ set which situates states of affairs more generally and has meanings like ‘be here’, ‘be there near you’, etc. (though they are not true verbs in the sense of being able to be used alone).

We will now see that, by applying these demonstratives with sentential scope, a range of engagement-type meanings can be coerced. Note that the engagement-related meanings are only a subset of the very rich range of metaphorical extensions found with the Abui demonstrative system – others, which we do not discuss, include their use to indicate tense and various kinds of modality.

Both basic and adverbial Abui demonstratives can be used in ways that are relevant to engagement. From the adverbial set (shown in the right half of Table 3), “the addressee-based forms are used when the speaker wants to evaluate or interact with addressee’s perspective” (Kratochvil, Reference Kratochvil2011a, p. 8). For example, say the addressee and the speaker are sitting in a traditional house with a leaking thatched roof. The speaker inquires whether the addressee is affected by the rain (there are no windows and it’s dark inside). Since they are together, he may simply say (18a). However, it is also possible to say (18b), using the addressee-proximal form ta to specifically invite the addressee’s assessment of the quality of the thatched roof above where the addressee is seated.

1. (18) a. anui ma o-pa=ng sei?

   rain be.sp.prx 2sg.recipi-touch.ipf=see come.down.cont

   ‘Is it raining on you here?’

2. b. anui ta o-pa=ng sei?

   rain be.ad.prx 2sg.recipi-touch.ipf=see come.down.cont

   ‘Is it raining on you here (where you are)?’

The addressee-based medial fa is used to indicate non-proximate location with respect to the addressee. Typically, this occurs when “the speaker wants to stress that the addressee is in another place or not aware of the location of an event or participant” (Kratochvil, Reference Kratochvil2011a, p. 9). For example, in performing a ‘matching task’, the speaker may be describing a picture to the addressee, so that he can match the description to a picture in the set he was given. Here “the speaker uses fa to locate two balls on the picture that the addressee is unable to see”:

1. (19) kaan-r-i, bal do fa ayoku

   good.cpl=reach-pfv ball sp.prx be.ad.med be.two

   ‘right, there are two balls there’

   [perhaps a closer translation would be ‘right, these balls (i.e., “these” on my picture) there’s (a picture) there (on your side) (where) there are two (of them)’]

At a higher syntactic and semantic level, members from the basic set can be placed in sentence-final position to index the distribution and extent of knowledge among speech-act participants. Speaker-proximal do can stress the speaker’s foundation for his assertion in immediate experience (20):

1. (20) na nala nee-ti beeka do

   1sg.a something.eat-phsl bad cannot sp.prx

   ‘I couldn’t eat up (swallow) anything.’

In questions, the addressee-based medial form can be used to appeal to what they may know of a situation, while the addressee-proximate form, if used with exclamatory force, can indicate that the question is redundant and that the information should be available to the addressee, thus functioning as a reproach – invoking both a type of evidence (perception) and a judgment about what the addressee could vs. did perceive. This is reminiscent of the Duna -noko suffix discussed above.

1. (21) A: mangmat, ma e-ya yo ?

   foster.child sp.prx 2sg-mother ad.med

   ‘Child, what about your mother?’

   B: ni-ya ha-rik to !

   1pl.exc-mother 3patient-hurt ad.prx

   ‘My mother is sick (as you could see).’

The addressee-medial form, likewise, may be used in sentence-final position in a reproachful way – in this context, “the speaker stresses that the addressee knew about the funeral and yet failed to attend” (Kratochvil, Reference Kratochvil, Yap, Grunow-Hårsta and Wrona2011b, p. 773).

1. (22) pi yaar-i ni-ya do nabuk yo

   1pl.inc go-pfv 1pl.exc-mother sp.prx bury ad.med

   ‘We went to bury our mother (as you could have known).’

The essence of the Abui system of recycling demonstratives is thus to shift their function upward, from coordinating attention to objects, in their basic use, to coordinating attention to states of affairs and their epistemic status, in the extended uses we have discussed (examples (20)–(22)). It is not unreasonable to see the unusual starting point of the basic system – which separates the proximal vs. medial contrast from that between speaker and addressee anchor-point – as providing an ideal semantic affordance for the extension into the more general management of epistemic gradients between speaker and hearer. ^{Footnote 7}

In the case of Abui, the demonstratives remain as separate words even as their function and syntactic position shifts to higher scopes. However, an interesting case where original demonstratives turn into verbal prefixes encoding semantic values of engagement is found in Marind, a language of Southern New Guinea (Olsson, Reference Olsson2016). In the present tense, Marind features two sets of verbal subject prefix complexes, encoding person, number, gender, and a category Olsson terms ‘absconditive’ (< Latin absconditus ‘hidden, concealed’), which are “used to establish joint attention, by instructing the Adr to ‘align’ her attention with Spr’s, and thereby get access to previously unavailable information” (p. 3). Summarising Olsson (Reference Olsson2016), the two main circumstances in which absconditive-series prefixes are used are when the speaker:

1. (i) “wants to draw attention to something outside Adr’s visual focus” (p. 1), e.g. when a speaker tells a child’s mother that the child’s nose is snotty, something the mother cannot see because the child is sitting on her lap, and

2. (ii) to “‘update common ground’ by denying Adr’s presuppositions” (p. 1), e.g. when someone tells an old woman that she should be talking Marind to the linguist so that he can learn, and the woman retorts that she is indeed doing that, using the absconditive in a way that would be translated into English as ‘I AM talking to him’ or ‘BUT I AM SO talking to him’.

What is relevant to our argument here is that the forms of absconditive prefixes can be broken down into two parts: an initial gender element, and a second deictic element identical in form to demonstratives. Interestingly, the use of the absconditive can be triggered either by the addressee’s (non-)attention to an entity, or to a state of affairs; it appears that the proximate vs. distal semantics of the deictic element is primarily exploited when the location of an entity is involved. Where the focus is on a state of affairs, the one example given by Olsson employs the form derived from the distal form.

The Marind absconditive is thus intriguingly parallel to the level-shifting trajectory we saw for Abui, but in a way takes it further by grammaticalising the deictic elements into actual prefixes on the verb. In doing this, it illustrates one grammaticalisation path by which verbs can evolve engagement morphology. What these two languages clearly demonstrate is the logical link between achieving mutual attention to objects in the here-and-now, and the more abstract job of producing convergence of epistemic positioning between speaker and addressee.

Abbreviations

1: first person, 2: second person, 3: third person, A: Actor, ABL: ablative, ABS: absolutive, AD.PRX: addressee proximal, ADR: addressee, AGT: agent, ART: article, ASSERT: assertion, ASYM: asymmetric, BENA: benefactive type A = unknown to beneficiary, BENB: benefactive type B = known to beneficiary, COMM: commitment, CONT: continuative, DAT: dative, DEF: definitive, DEM: demonstrative, DIR: directional, ENCL: enclosure, ERG: ergative, EXC: exclusive, EXP: expected knowledge, FOC: focus, FP: far past, FUT: future, GEN: genitive, HAB: habitual, IMP: imperative, IMPF: imperfective, INC: inclusive, IND: independent, INT: interrogative, INTJ: interjection, INTS: intensifier, INTSUBJ: intersubjective, IPF: imperfective, KTS, known to speaker, LOC: locative, MAL: malefactive, MIR: mirative, NAR: negative for addressee, NEG: negative, NMZ: nominaliser, O: object, OBJ: object, PERF: perfective, PFV: perfective, PHSL: phasal (roughly: ‘after’), PL: plural, POSS: possessor, POT: potential, POT.OBS, potential observation, PRES: present, PROG: progressive, PROX: proximal/proximate, PSN: personal name; PST: past, PTCP: participial, PTCY, participatory evidential, Q: question, RECIPI: recipient, REK: reported evidence known, REM: remote, REU: reported evidence previously unknown, RLZ: realization, S: intransitive subject, SBJ: subject, SG: singular, SPKR: speaker, SP.PRX: speaker proximal, SSA: seen by speaker and addressee, SUB: subjunctive, SUBJ: subjective, SYM: symmetric, UNM: unmarked.