Otseconcepts: Privileged access to information

An individual has unique access to their mental state, that is, they know directly what they are thinking/experiencing/intending and anyone else can only know that indirectly. This is important in Otseqon for understanding the distribution of certain constructions: subjective verbs and the volitional form.

Subjective verbs are basically psych predicates, making statements about the individual's internal state. I use the term "subjective verbs" since there are some subjective/objective pairs of words with similar meanings, for example hikii ‘to feel hot (it's a hot summer day and I'm really hot)’ versus awahi ‘to get hot (to the touch)’. This is sort of an animacy distinction or sort of a distinction of the former describing a sentient being's internal experience (the sensation of feeling hot) and the latter describing an external trait of something (e.g. touching it could burn you). Animates can be used with the objective verbs but this sort of coerces them to being described like an inanimate; for example if you are trying to determine if someone has a fever you might touch their forehead and say ééwahi (PFV-get.hot) ‘he is hot to the touch’.

The volitional form is a type of causative that indicates that the agent acted with the intention to make an action or state come about (defeasible implicature that it did in fact happen). This ascribes control and intention on the part of the agent, making a statement about their internal state.

In Otseqon these two constructions exhibit a rather egophoric-like distribution. They can only be used with non-first persons in declaratives in combination with an evidential marker (usually the inferred or assumed evidential, and not usually the reported evidential, for reasons that will be described below). That is, you cannot say hikii ‘he is hot’ or anhikii (2SG-feel.hot) ‘you are hot’, but have to say anhikiisan (2SG-feel.hot-INFER) ‘you seem hot (you're sweating a lot)’ or hikii kara (feel.hot ASSUM) ‘he is probably hot (after all it's hot as hell out here)’. Similarly you can't say natarote (3ERG-get.set.on.fire-VOL) ‘he (tried to) set it on fire’. (You can say natarore (3ERG-get.set.on.fire-POT) or natarose (3ERG-get.set.on.fire-CAUS), and the differences between the various causative constructions is a topic for a later post. Suffice it to say -CAUS entails control, but is ambiguous as to intention, and -POT lacks either. -CAUS also does not entail direct involvement, i.e. it can mean the agent merely allowed something to happen instead of directly acting to make it so.)

There are two contexts where subjective constructions can be used with non-first persons without an evidential. One is questions with a second person agent or experiencer: anhikii wo? (2SG-feel.hot or/Q) ‘are you hot?’ is perfectly acceptable, since you are not making a statement about someone else's mental state but asking someone who has unique access to that information.

The last is logophoric contexts with third person agents or experiencers, e.g. nte hikii (3ERG.say.VOL feel.hot) ‘heᵢ said heᵢ is hot’. Of course nte ihikii (3ERG.say.VOL 1SG-feel.hot) ‘he said “I am hot”’ is also acceptable and Otseqon generally prefers direct speech over indirect speech. The difference between them is somewhat subtle, but roughly comes down to indirect speech indicating that the speaker is adopting the quotee's point of view and may feel like a stronger endorsement or what was said while direct speech feels more neutral. Quotatives like this are generally preferred over the reportative evidential for relaying information about another person's mental state obtained directly from them.