Abstract
Languages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms of indexical shift: A direct quotation like “Selena said, ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves perspective shift because the first-person indexical ‘I’ refers to Selena, not to the actual speaker. We then discuss a variety of noncanonical modality-specific perspective-shifting devices: role shift in signed language, quotatives in spoken language, free indirect discourse in written language, and point-of-view shift in visual language. We show that these devices permit complex mixed forms of perspective shift which may involve nonlinguistic gestural as well as visual components.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 59-76 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Annual Review of Linguistics |
Volume | 8 |
Early online date | 4-Oct-2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan-2022 |