Abstract
From the point of view of everyday talk and especially, casual conversation, it is obvious that language use is highly perspectivized with a clear focus on the speech-act participants. This fact is supported by observations regarding the pervasiveness of egophoric pronouns and the frequent use of the modal particlesjuandvälin spoken Swedish. The paper demonstrates how egophoric pronouns, modal particles, and mental verbs are used to signal the epistemic perspective of the speech-act participants, i.e., when the knowledge and attention of the speech-act participants are at stake. These formally distinct resources show patterns of co-distribution that permit an analysis of forms in terms of how they signal shared/private access to events from the perspective of the speaker and the addressee.
Highlights
Egophoric contexts target the perspective of the speaking/to-be speaking subjects, and in such contexts, grammatical constructs like sentence-type, pronouns, tense-aspect marking, epistemic modals, and adverbs are used to position the speech-act participants with respect to talked-about events
The analysis of the mental verbs tro (“believe”), veta (“know”), and hoppas (“hope”) above shows that these occur with different frequencies and that they are differently distributed with respect to egophoric pronouns
Important aspects of assuming a perspective can be seen in dialogic exchanges between the speech-act participants, where parallelisms and the partial reproduction of previous utterances are used in the negotiation of epistemic authority
Summary
Egophoric contexts target the perspective of the speaking/to-be speaking subjects, and in such contexts, grammatical constructs like sentence-type, pronouns, tense-aspect marking, epistemic modals, and adverbs are used to position the speech-act participants with respect to talked-about events. These are subject pronouns (jag/du/man), modal particles (ju/väl), mental verbs (tro, veta, hoppas), and sentence-type (SV/VS, argument-predicate order).
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