Abstract
Research spanning linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that speakers and hearers are finely attuned to perspectives and viewpoints that are not their own, even though perspectival information is not encoded directly in the morphosyntax of languages like English. While some terms seem to require a perspective or a judge for interpretation (e.g., epithets, evaluative adjectives, locational PPs, etc.), perspective may also be determined on the basis of subtle information spanning multiple sentences, especially in vivid styles of narrative reporting. In this paper, I develop an account of the cues that are involved in evaluating and maintaining non-speaker perspectives, and present an economy-based discourse processing model of perspective that embodies two core principles. First, perspectives are subject to a “speaker-default,” but may shift to a non-speaker perspective if sufficient contextual cues are provided. Second, the processor follows the path of least resistance to maintaining perspective, opting to maintain the current perspective across sentences as long as the shifted perspective continues to be coherent. The predictions of the model are tested in a series of offline and online studies, manipulating the form of an attitude report and the tense of the sentence that follows. Implications for processing perspective and viewpoint in speech and narrative forms are explored.
Highlights
Language users are clearly sensitive to perspectives other than their own
Utilizing the perspective shifting tendencies of narrative parenthetical reports, as in It was a time of utter chaos, lamented Mary, this paper explores how the tense of a following continuation influences whether the perspective stays shifted with the third-person or reverts back to the speaker
Present tense in a continuation had a greater effect on interpretation when following a Narrative parenthetical report, supporting the idea that the effect of Narrative parentheticals and Tense on perspective is greater than the effect of either condition individually
Summary
Language users are clearly sensitive to perspectives other than their own. And yet, there appears to be no uniform or determinate way to convey point of view, even though many lexical items, e.g., beautiful or nearby, seem to require that a viewpoint be assessed for interpretation (e.g., Mitchell, 1986; Partee, 1989; Lasersohn, 2005; Stephenson, 2007, among many others in linguistics and philosophy). Many lexical and contextual cues have been explored experimentally: epithets (Harris and Potts, 2009, 2011; Kaiser, 2015) or other expressives, like damn (Frazier et al, 2015), verbs of saying (Harris and Potts, 2009), evaluative adjectives (Kaiser and Lee, 2018; Kaiser, to appear), as well as subtle prosodic and non-verbal modulations (Harris and Potts, 2011) This project turns to how perspective shift is achieved in vivid narration style, in which the perspectival center shifts to a thirdperson character. A shifted perspective is more likely to extend to the following sentence when it is presented in Present tense, placing the reported event within a single, continuous “contextual now.” I argue that the results support an economy-based model of perspective processing, in which the discourse processor discourages perspective shifting generally, but maintains a shifted perspective when possible for continuity
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