Egophoricity and differential access to knowledge in Yongning Na (Mosuo)

Abstract Yongning Na, a Tibeto-Burman language close to Lolo-Burmese, is spoken in southwestern China within the Sinitic, Himalayan, and mainland Southeast Asian linguistic areas. Na has a non-canonical egophoric system which differs from other systems in the area, such as those of Tibetan and Newar, with respect to the ways that person patterns within the system; the forms that marking takes; and the way that the system is leveled in the interrogative. Instead of a two-way distinction with respect to person, Na makes a three-way distinction: first person statements can be made unequivocally; second person ‘statements’ are formed as interrogatives; and third person statements are qualified, with the form of qualification dependent upon verbal semantic class: volitional, internal state, or observable state (Lidz 2007). These coding distinctions represent a grammaticalization of the differential access to knowledge in speech interactions among first, second, and third persons. Marking indicates whether the first, second, or third person subject has direct access to knowledge under assertion. In Na, the relevant forms include evidential particles, a future marker, and an interrogative construction, rather than copulas or verbal morphology. Differential access to knowledge and evidentiality are tightly entwined in Na, which is perhaps not surprising as the two encode closely related concepts: differential access to knowledge marks direct versus indirect access to knowledge, while evidentiality marks source of knowledge (Aikhenvald 2004). The Na system does not occur in the interrogative mood, in distinct contrast with attested egophoric systems.