Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse

‘Perspective’ and ‘viewpoint’ are widely used in everyday talk as well as in the specialist languages of the social, cognitive, and literary sciences. Taken from the field of visual perception and representation, these concepts have acquired a general meaning and significance, as characteristics of human cognitive processing. Since, however, this field is shared by an increasing body of disciplines, perspective terms have also acquired specific and technical meanings. A striking example is the newly introduced use of ‘perspectivation’ in discourse analysis.
This volume on ‘perspective and perspectivation’ — the first of its kind — will help to fill the gap between the common understanding of perspective and the specifics of its structure and dynamics as they have been elaborated in the human sciences, mainly in psychology and linguistics. The focus is on the structure of perspectivity in cognition and language, and the dynamics of setting and taking perspectives in social interaction and in the construction and understanding of texts. Both topics are presented here in an interdisciplinary way by a group of linguists and psychologists.

Eva Hajicová, in The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 82, 2004:
The volume under review offers a many-sided discussion related to perspectivation of utterances and larger segments of discourse with respect to the position, role and characteristics of the interlocutors and the discourse as well as to the particular situation in which the discourse takes place. Though the issues under investigation are not primarily viewed from the point of the (linguistic) means of expression of the perspectives in language, almost all of the papers included bring some interesting insights into language as used in communication. The most precious feature of the present volume is the due regard paid to empirical analysis, careful selection of data and perspicuous presentation of the material analyzed.