The Perspectival System
We have seen that the ‘Configurational Structure System’ structures participants and scenes in space and time, and the ‘Attentional System’ governs the distribution of attention over those referents. The ‘Perspectival System’ establishes a viewpoint from which participants and scenes are viewed. This system relates to the conceptual ‘perspective point’ from which we view an entity or a scene and involves the four schematic categories: location, distance, mode and direction. These can be encoded by closed-class elements.
Perspectival location
This category relates to the location that a perspective point occupies relative to a given utterance. The linguistic system of deixis, for example, works by signalling perspective relative to the speaker’s location, and deictic expressions are then interpreted with respect to that point of reference. As we saw in Chapter 14, the grammatical person system is an example of a deictic category, an idea that we explore in more detail later in the chapter (section 15.3.2).
Perspectival distance
In some languages, open- or closed-class expressions can signal ‘proximal’, ‘medial’ or ‘distal’ distance of a referent relative to speaker or hearer. This phenomenon therefore also relates to deixis. This is illustrated by the following examples from Hausa, a West African language belonging to the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family (Buba 2000). In this language, demonstrative determiners, pronouns and adverbs show a four-way deictic distinction, where distance interacts with location. The examples in (21) illustrate the behaviour of the pre-nominal demonstrative determiners:
In these examples, the grave accent represents a low tone vowel whereas a vowel unmarked for tone is high. A macron indicates a long vowel whereas a vowel unmarked for length is short. As these examples demonstrate, Hausa is a tone language, where the relative pitch of the vowels can give rise to differences in meaning, both in terms of content and in terms of marking grammatical differences.
Perspectival mode
This schematic category relates to whether a perspective point is in motion or not. This interacts with perspectival distance, where ‘distal’ tends to correlate with ‘stationary’ and ‘proximal’ with ‘moving’. If the perspective point is stationary, it is in synoptic mode. If the perspective point is moving, it is in sequential mode. Talmy argues that this category is also relevant to aspect. Perfect aspect encodes a perspective that is distal and stationary, because the event depicted is viewed as a completed whole. Progressive aspect, on the other hand, encodes an event that is proximal and ‘moving’, because the event is viewed as immediate and ‘ongoing’. This is illustrated by the examples in (22).
Example (22a) invokes the perspective of a fixed vantage point. In contrast, example (22b) invokes a motion perspective, as a result of which the houses are seen one or some at a time.
Perspectival direction
The final schematic category relating to perspective point is perspectival direction. This category also interacts closely with attention and concerns the direction in which an event is viewed relative to a given perspective point. The direction can be prospective or retrospective. Consider the examples in (23).
Observe that that it is not the order of the events themselves that distinguishes the two examples; in both cases, George first finishes the champagne and then goes home. The difference relates to the direction from which the two events are viewed, which is illustrated in Figures 15.5 and 15.6.
In Figure 15.5 the event-sequence is viewed from the perspective of the first event, event A. This is called a prospective direction because the perspective point is located at the temporally earlier event, from which the speaker looks ‘forward’ to the later event. In Figure 15.6 the event-sequence is viewed from the perspective of the second event, event B (going home). This is called a retrospective direction because the perspective point is located at the temporally later event (going home) and the viewing direction is ‘back wards’, towards the earlier event. Observe that perspectival direction rests upon the temporal sequence model of time that we discussed in Chapter 3. Figure 15.7 summarises the four schematic categories of the ‘Perspectival System’.
