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Article published In:
Irregular perspective shifts and perspective persistence: Discourse-oriented and theoretical approaches
Edited by Caroline Gentens, María Sol Sansiñena, Stef Spronck and An Van linden
[Pragmatics 29:2] 2019
► pp. 226–249

The emergence of viewpoints in multiple perspective constructions

| LMU Munich
This paper tackles the question of how multiple viewpoints emerge through the interplay of different viewpoint parameters within the (i) dynamics of discourse and (ii) their diachronic development. In particular, it will focus on ‘Future of Fate’ (FoF) (e.g. He was never to return.), i.e. future-in-the-past meanings with potentially distinct values both on the semantic dimension of temporality and the dimension of knowledge attribution. These viewpoint meanings are ‘irregular’ in the sense that they cannot be predicted solely on the basis of the grammatical context of past modal obligation. Based on empirical analyses of German sollte + inf. and the méllō construction in Homeric Greek, it is shown that the – diachronic as well as synchronic – emergence of viewpoints is the result of the interplay between the deictic structure of grammatical elements and the perspectival structure of discourse context.
Keywords: perspective, narrativity, modality, epistemicity, evidentiality, future-of-fate, subjectification
Article outline
  • 1.Multiple perspectives and ubiquity of viewpoints – some basic premises
  • 2.Future-of-Fate readings as multiple perspective constructions
  • 3.Emergence of viewpoints in FoF readings – the synchronic dimension
    • 3.1The semantic pattern of ‘sollte’ + inf.
    • 3.2The semantic pattern in crosslinguistic comparison
    • 3.3Disambiguating factors
    • 3.4Interim conclusion: Disambiguating factors and the emergence of viewpoints
  • 4.Emergence of viewpoints – The diachronic dimension
  • 5.Conclusions: Mechanisms of the emergence of multiple viewpoints and viewpoint interaction
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Primary sources
  • Refererences
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 14 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18051.zem
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