The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification
By Nicholas Evans, Henrik Bergqvist, Lila San Roque. Language and Cognition, 2017
107 citations recorded by the source corpus.
abstract Human language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central to everyday communication, our knowledge of the cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce the term ‘engagement’ to refer to grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs, and describe examples of engagement systems from around the world. Engagement systems express the speaker’s assumptions about the degree to which their attention or knowledge is shared (or not shared) by the addressee. Engagement categories can operate at the level of entities in the here-and-now (deixis), in the unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), and even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). In this first paper, we introduce engagement and situate it with respect to existing work on intersubjectivity in language. We then explore the key role of deixis in coordinating attention and expressing engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic systems from those that focus on the the location of the speaker, to those that encode the attentional state of the addressee.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b9b2450ef03b8401ecee91c69b862988023eed6
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Citations in the corpus
- Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind (2020, background): “…grammar is not limited to demonstrative expressions: Evans and colleagues have coined the term grammar of engagement to refer to those grammatical means by which languages encode intersubjectivity (Evans 2006b; Evans et al. 2018a, b; compare, e.g., ‘We bought a house’ vs. ‘We bought the house’).”
- Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. (2022, unknown): “All in all, this calls for fi nding common linguistic ground from which to understand and measure the potential linguistic roots of ToM, ideally tapping into linguistic resources with broad crosslinguistic attestation [102,103].”