Mỹky interlocutor exponence and the syntax of the speech act

Abstract

Mỹky is an isolated polysynthetic language spoken in southern Amazonia, in the western area of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso (Monserrat 2010; Bardagil 2023). One of the morpheme slots on the right edge of the polysynthetic verb displays a morphological alternation, with one form corresponding to a speaker and addressee of the same category, and another form to interlocutors of different categories. I lay out a proposal to account for this alternation as an instance of morphological indexing of speech act-level participants, rather than event- or clause-level, by adopting a Par- ticipant Structure Analysis (Portner et al. 2019, 2022) and reframing Status as a broader notion called Sameness.