Abstract:
Perspective is one of the factors involved in the diversification of schema. The viewpoint from which one looks at a scene somehow affects the process of semantic representation of that scene. Every sentence has its special schema drawn upon the scene in question, and adopting different points of view towards the same event will result in the speakers’ choosing different linguistic structures to express the event. Therefore, perspective is one of the most salient structure-formation processes that has received much attention from cognitive linguists.Cognitivists interested in linguistic impacts of perspective, following Langacker(1987), have laid their study on the assumption that the relative status and the angle of vision influence what language is used in describing certain situations. However, the question in this regard is whether or not the two parameters meet the adequacy required both for describing and for explaining different scenes linguistically. The answer seems to be that the specific perspective taken by the speaker is itself very much based on some further elements as animacy, dynamicity, size, and speaker. Present article is therefore written in order to question the problem of perspective, and the elements that are likely to bear upon its linguistic representation in Persian. Furthermore, it will also be taken into question if, according to what cognitive linguists argue for, there is such a universal cognitional framework common to all the human beings. For this purpose, a body of Persian written and spoken data, gathered from narrative dialogues and everyday talks, is to be examined inductively. Although this is an unprecedented study on some fundamental cognitive-semantic issues, the results would pretty hopefully apply in much more detailed semantic analyses of sentence perspective as well.
Machine summary:
Every sentence has its special schema drawn upon the scene in question, and adopting different points of view towards the same event will result in the speakers’ choosing different linguistic structures to express the event.
Cognitivists interested in linguistic impacts of perspective, following Langacker(1987), have laid their study on the assumption that the relative status and the angle of vision influence what language is used in describing certain situations.
One of the main factors that should be taken into account in studying perspective is to determine what reference point a speaker has adopted in describing a scene.
Our aim in writing this article is therefore to introduce a number of explicit cognitive procedures through which a Persian speaker would single out a landmark and a trajectory in describing every scene.
b. Patu xodaš rā ruye tarlān kešid blanket itself-acc over Tarlan creep-3rd sing-past ?
d. Hasan panjere rā az kenāre dast-aš bardāšt Hassan window-acc from near hand-his take away-3rd sing-past ?
In a more careful look into the above examples and many other unmarked sentences, we will find out that speakers usually choose a mobile item as the trajectory, and an immobile one as the landmark.
The distortion of the above perspectives in the following set of sentences indicates that where animacy hierarchy, mobility, and size are neutralized (in b and c), linguistic inversion of the scene elements will not necessarily lead to semantic anomalism.