Perspective taking is crucial to the interpretation of language. Languages are equipped with a wide range of linguistic means to anchor utterances to their contexts, such as pronouns, tenses, evaluative language and particles. While such perspectival elements are mostly used from the perspective of the speaker, they can also be used from the perspective of someone else. For successful communication to take place, speakers need to be able to express perspective in ways that hearers can recover and understand. The perspectival behaviour of many individual linguistic classes has been studied in linguistics and philosophy of language, but the perspectival complexity of natural languages raises many questions which remain unanswered.
This complexity becomes even greater and more prominent in narrative discourse. For one thing, in such discourses we typically have a (linguistically constructed) narrator in addition to the (flesh-and-blood) author. What's more, the anchoring time can be dissociated from the narrator's actual now (as in the historical use of the present tense), and, even more fascinatingly, we sometimes seem to be 'within another person's consciousness' (as is arguably the case with the narratological devices of Free Indirect Discourse and protagonist projection). No wonder then that in recent years narrative perspective, originally the domain of text linguists and narratologists, has increasingly come into focus of researchers in many other disciplines concerned with language including (formal) semantics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
Approaching the end of the ERC-funded project 'Unraveling the Language of Perspective' we would like to bring together some insights but also challenges formulated by these different strands of research to explore the possibilities of a unified approach to narrative perspective. Examples of questions we would like to address include:
Are there syntactic or semantic properties or phenomena exclusive to narrative discourse? How are they related to the issue of perspective-taking? What role does the presence of a narrator play?
How are perspectives in narrative discourse pragmatically signaled and communicated?
Are there differences in perspective-taking between literary or fictional and non-fictional narratives?
How is narrative perspective-taking realized in pre-modern literatures, e.g. Ancient Greek, where many modern devices like Free Indirect Discourse don't exist?
What is the role of imagination and empathy in understanding narratives and perspective-taking?
How are perspectives in narrative represented in the mind of a reader? How can those representations be formally modelled?
What can cognitive neuroscience tell us about (narrative) perspective-taking? Are there neurocognitive correlates of perspective-taking?
How do the results on perspective-taking in language relate to the 'theory of mind' debate?
The workshop is part of the ERC project Unraveling the Language of Perspective (ERC Starting Grant 338421-Perspective).
There will be no workshop fee. If you are interested in attending the workshop, please send an email to c.bary@ftr.ru.nl.
