On the existence of egophoricity across clause types in Totoró Namtrik

The Barbacoan languages are known for having egophoricity systems (Dickinson 2000, Curnow 2002, Curnow & Liddicoat 1998), which exhibit a verbal marking pattern in which “speaker subjects in statements are marked the same way as addressee subjects in questions” (Curnow 2002: 614). Nevertheless, the existence of such a pattern in Namtrik had not been recognized. A recent paper by Norcliffe (2018) claims that in the Guambianovariety of Namtrik “the verb marking diverges from what might be considered canonical egophoricity marking, since it does not occur when the subject is second person in questions” (Norcliffe 2018). The current paper presents novel data from the highly endangered variety of Totoró Namtrik and argues that this variety possesses a set of verbal suffixes exhibiting the cross-linguistically recurrent pattern of an egophoricity distribution. The goal of this paper is to show that although Namtrik’s egophoricity system is similar to the systems in other languages, it was not analyzed as a fully fleged egophoricity system in the past because the egophoricity suffixes are not always easily recognizable in interrogative clauses due to morphosyntactic and phonological processes. Additionally, this paper shows that Namtrik has an “undergoer” egophoric marker which exhibits a pattern of egophoricity distribution, shifting from speaker to addressee perspective in interrogatives