Egophoricity

In linguistics, egophoricity refers to a grammatical category that marks one's personal involvement in an event. In languages with this category, an egophoric form is used for expressing information to which the self has "privileged access" as opposed to an allophoric (or non-egophoric) form.

Egophoric forms are typically associated with first-person subject declarative sentences and second-person subject interrogative sentences (egophoric distribution).

The concept of egophoricity was originally developed in descriptive studies on Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the Himalayas such as Newar and Tibetan; however, the category has also been found in languages of Northwestern China, the Andean region, Caucasus, New Guinea, and elsewhere.

"Ego-" refers to "self" and "-phor" means "to carry".

The term "egophoric" was coined by French linguist Nicolas Tournadre in his description of Lhasa Tibetan although his former supervisor Claude Hagège had used "égophore" in a different sense prior to that.

Before "egophoricity" came into use in the literature, linguists often referred to the same phenomenon by the term conjunct and disjunct forms. The distinction between conjunct/disjunct was first made in Austin Hale's work on Kathmandu Newar.

Usually, the marking of egophoricity is correlated with grammatical person and sentence types: egophoric forms typically occur with the first-person subject in declarative sentences and the second-person subject in questions. By contrast, non-egophoric forms will appear in the other contexts. This pattern is called egophoric distribution.

Unlike person agreement, however, the use of (non-)egophoric forms may not follow it under certain semantic or pragmatic situations.