A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE: VIEWPOINT PHENOMENA IN THE EVOLUTION OF GRAMMAR

Language provides a variety of means to conceptualize objects, states, events, and abstract entities in different ways and from different perspectives. These so-called ‘construal operations’ play a key role in Cognitive Linguistics. With the example of construal operations pertaining to viewpoint and perspectivation, this paper aims to demonstrate how different theoretical and methodological approaches can be combined to yield a better understanding of how languages systematically make use of general cognitive capacities of perspective-taking, -setting, and sharing. These insights can in turn shed light on the evolution of specific grammatical phenomena as well as on the evolution of langua…