Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony (Evans & Bergqvist)
This week's paper was sent to me by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, and I decided to use it in a TyPoW. According to the paper, "engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee". It is a relatively newly-established grammatical category, and is, as far as I can tell, not that widely known among us. An example from Andoke, an South American isolate, goes as follows: páa bʌ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as we can both see).', páa kẽ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as I witness, but which you were not aware of)'. Now onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature engagement systems?
- How do they work?
- Have you considered diachronical processes while creating it?
- How does engagement interact with other epistemic modes of access?
- Does your language feature evidentiality or egophoricity?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!