Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Anchoring conditions for the mind. The syntax of egophoricity in Kathmandu Newā
- Date
- Thursday 24 September 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.31
Abstract
Egophoricity (henceforth EGO) is a pervasive category of Newā in that clauses must be marked as either [+ego] or [-ego] (Hale 1980). Roughly, [+ego] is used to mark the utterance participant’s direct access to the seat of knowledge of the reported event (as in 1st person declarative and 2nd person interrogatives), while [-ego] is used to mark no access to the seat of knowledge, as in 3rd person declaratives. The goal of this talk is to show that EGO in Newā can be analyzed as the
anchoring category (akin to Tense in English). That is, rather than anchoring the event to the utterance via temporal arguments, we argue that EGO relates the mind of the event participant to the mind of the utterance participant. This analysis correctly predicts that the clausal architecture is organized around mind arguments rather than temporal arguments. This is evidenced by the following phenomena from various domains of the grammar:
- Tense does not behave like the anchoring category in Newā.
- The Point-of-View category of Newā, like its anchoring category, is about participant's minds. This accounts for the fact that, in some contexts, EGO encodes a contrast in event control.
- Temporally based viewpoint aspect (perfective/imperfective) does not behave like a grammatical category in Newā.
- Verbal classification is not conditioned by temporal notions (such as telicity) but instead evolves around mental notions (such as volitionally).
- EGO marking in embedded clauses is used to mark a contrast in coreference between embedded and matrix subjects. In addition, we observe sequence of EGO effects (akin to sequence of tense effects).
In as much as this analysis is on the right track, this would add an epistemic category to the inventory of possible anchoring categories identified in Wiltschko (2014). The proposed analysis differs from previous analyses, according to which EGO is a form of evidentiality: it does not concern the nature of the evidence the speaker has but instead uses speaker's mind as a deictic anchor.