The Interconnection between Perspective-Taking Process and World-Creating Predicates in Language Use

Abstract

Perspective-taking (PT) is a fundamental cognitive faculty that enables individuals to understand and engage with others’ viewpoints. This paper focuses on overt linguistic items that directly signal perspectival shifts. Central to this investigation are world-creating predicates, such as verbs of cognition (e.g., think, believe) and utterance (e.g., say, tell), which contribute to the construction of perspectivity in language. Drawing on attributional semantics, this study argues that these predicates differ in their relation to PT: while predicates of utterance merely express another’s perspective, predicates of cognition more actively require the speaker to adopt that perspective. Through contextual analysis, the paper demonstrates how these predicates operate along a private-public domain continuum, with implications for identifying actual PT occurrences in discourse. Ultimately, it has been demonstrated that predicates establish perspectivity in two distinct ways, depending on their degree of egocentricity. For example, predicates of cognition (think, believe) belong to the private domain and lead to actual occurrences of PT, as they compel the speaker to adopt another’s perspective — to “put themselves in someone else’s shoes”. In contrast, predicates of utterance (say, tell) belong to the public domain and indicate merely the linguistic expression of a perspective without requiring the speaker to adopt it. In other words, these predicates simply attribute verbally expressed content to an “I” distinct from the speaker. Additionally, a five-level partial ordering has been proposed to capture gradations between the extremes of the private-public domain.