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Egophoricity
Edited by Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe and Lila San Roque
[Typological Studies in Language 118] 2018
► pp. 405–436

Chapter 13
Egophoric patterns in Duna verbal morphology

| Radboud University | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

In the language Duna (Trans New Guinea), egophoric distributional patterns are a pervasive characteristic of verbal morphology, but do not comprise a single coherent system. Many morphemes, including evidential markers and future time inflections, show strong tendencies to co-occur with ‘informant’ subjects (the speaker in a declarative, the addressee in an interrogative), or alternatively with non-informant subjects. The person sensitivity of the Duna forms is observable in frequency, speaker judgments of sayability, and subject implicatures. Egophoric and non-egophoric distributional patterns are motivated by the individual semantics of the morphemes, their perspective-taking properties, and logical and/or conventionalised expectations of how people experience and talk about events. Distributional tendencies can also be flouted, providing a resource for speakers to convey attitudes towards their own knowledge and experiences, or the knowledge and experiences of others.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Encoding knowledge in interaction
    • 1.2Language background
    • 1.3Egophoricity in the Duna context
  • 2.Evidentials and subject person associations
  • 3.Talking about the future
    • 3.1Overview of non-directive future markers
    • 3.2Intentive
    • 3.3Prophetic
    • 3.4A note on the ‘promissive’ inflection
  • 4.The odd one out: An egophoric present tense inflection?
  • 5.Summary and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 25 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.118.13san
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