Perspective Structure in Language Production and Comprehension

Abstract

‘Perspective’ is a common term in phenomenology, in social psychology, and in language psychology. The perceptual, cognitive and social evidence gathered in these different contexts points towards a cognitive theory of perspectivity which we are constructing and trying to apply to phenomena of language production and comprehension in a social context. Several experiments demonstrate the influence of perspective on text production and text comprehension. It is shown that perspective affects not only content variables but also linguistic structure. The results show effects on macrostructures, verbs and verbal slips, as well as on the choice of the grammatical subject and on inferences about the events and actors presented in a film or in a text. Effects are produced by perspectives of speaker as well as of hearer and by perspectives linguistically realised in a text. Implications for a conception of cognitive and linguistic perspectivity are discussed.