Workshop – Point of View in Language

Mahrad Almotahari

The Second-Person Standpoint and Conversational AI

Cooperative speech is purposive. From the speaker’s perspective, one crucial purpose is the transmission of knowledge. Cooperative speakers care about getting things right for their conversational partners. This attitude is a kind of respect. Cooperative speech is an ideal form of communication because it involves mutual respect between participants. And having respect for your partner, within a cooperative arrangement, is sufficient for a particular kind of moral standing: we ought to respect those who have respect for us. Respect demands reciprocity. I maintain that large language models (LLMs) aren’t owed the kind of respect that partly constitutes a cooperative conversation. This implies that they aren’t cooperative conversational partners, for otherwise we would be obliged to reciprocate the attitude. Leveraging this conclusion, I argue that LLMs are incapable of anything like assertion. Paradigmatically successful assertions owe at least as much for their success to attitudes that live in moral psychology (“the second-person standpoint”) as they do to attitudes that belong to cognitive psychology.

Márta Abrusán

Subjective Knowledge

In some languages, e.g. in Hungarian and some Turkic languages, putting the verb `know' in certain syntactic frames makes it not factive. These uses are not equivalent to reporting belief: they report an attitude that the attitude holder would likely characterise as knowledge, but not the speaker. In this talk I examine such cases in Hungarian in detail and explore what they might teach us about knowledge in general.

Stefan Hinterwimmer

The Interaction of Gender Marking and Perspective Taking in German

The talk deals with a phenomenon regarding the interaction of perspective-taking with morphosyntactic gender that to the best of our knowledge has not been discussed so far: In Free Indirect Discourse (FID) and Viewpoint Shifting/Protagonist Projection (VS/PP), there is a strong preference for a pronoun that refers to an individual whose thoughts, utterances or perceptions are represented to match the gender identity of that individual rather than the morphosyntactic gender of the DP functioning as its immediate antecedent in discourse. We propose that the preference for semantic agreement in FID and VS/PP is due to increased empathy with the individual functioning as the perspectival center, leading to the expectation that the gender features of the pronoun are compatible with the perspectival center’s expressive self-concept.

Cameron Kirk-Giannini

Metalinguistic Comparison Is Covert Mixed Quotation

One intuitively attractive idea about metalinguistic comparatives like 'John more stumbled into his career than actively sought it' is that they convey judgments about the relative appropriateness of different expressions: given the extra-linguistic facts, it would be more appropriate to describe John as having stumbled into his career than it would be to describe him as having actively sought it. However, an analysis along these lines faces the problem of showing how the relevant readings can be generated compositionally in a non-ad hoc manner. Drawing on some of my recent work on quotation, I show how the intuitive truth conditions of metalinguistic comparatives can be predicted by treating them as instances of covert mixed quotation that interact with an independently motivated covert appropriateness operator. Along the way, I respond to some objections to the appropriateness proposal and compare it to recent work by Rudolph and Kocurek (2020).

Dilip Ninan

A Relationist Theory of Intentional Identity

I argue for `relationism about belief'. According to this view, facts of the form "A believes that p and B believes that q" are not in general reducible to facts of the form "C believes that r". The primary motivation for this view concerns intentional identity sentences like Geach's `Hob-Nob' sentence: "Hob believes that a witch blighted Bob's mare and Nob believes that she killed Cob's sow." I develop a version of relationism couched within possible worlds semantics, and explore various aspects of the resulting view.

Isidora Stojanovic

Point of View in Moral Language

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. Tis talk aims to make a contribution of that kind. I will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study, conducted in collaboration with Louise McNally, that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates. I will further tackle the question whether our data speak in favor of building sensitivity to point of view into the semantics of moral predicates.

Malte Willer

Points of View for Strict Modals and Conditionals

A recurring criticism of strict analyses of modals and conditionals is that they have trouble making sense of less-than-certain modal and conditional judgments. I show how appealing to the notion of a maximally opinionated point of view allows proponents of a strict analysis to respond to this central concern.

Sonja Zeman

Viewpoint Asymmetries, Perspectival Paradoxes, and Kaleidoscopic Grammar

“Grammar emerges from conversation as a method for supporting accurate tracking and switching of perspective.” (MacWhinney 2005: 198)

Investigations on Point of View (PoV) in language often focus on perspective-taking and perspective-shifting. It is studied, for example, how PoVs of speakers, narrators and characters can be taken and shifted, and which linguistics markers are responsible for PoV disambiguation. In my talk, I would like to take a more general view by focusing on different kinds of perspective mismatches, i.e. PoV inconsistencies that involve contrastive perspectives and can therefore lead either to restrictions in perspective taking or to perspectival paradoxes. In this context, I will discuss examples of the polysemy of modal verbs, narrative metalepsis, and self-reference in self-talk. Combining these observations with semiotic approaches and cognitive research on (inter)subjectivity (e.g. Zlatev et al. 2008), I will argue that PoV asymmetries can lead to the emergence of a more complex viewpoint structure as in epistemic effects and catalyse grammatical change. As such, PoV asymmetries can be seen as a more fundamental principle linked to mechanisms of contrast. This hypothesis is discussed against the background of Toyota’s 2009 concept of ‘kaleidoscopic grammar’, which assumes that the collapse of binary opposition is the precondition for the development of hierarchical relations.

Overall, the paper takes up the position of MacWhinney 2005, who argues that perspective taking is not “a secondary pragmatic filter […] that operates only after hard linguistic constraints have been fulfilled” but lies “at the very core of language structure” (MacWhinney 2005: 198).

References

MacWhinney, Brian. 2005. The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective. In Diane Pecher & Rolf A. Zwaan (eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The role of perception and action in memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198-223.

Toyota, Junichi. 2009. Kaleidoscopic Grammar: Investigation into the Nature of Binarism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Zlatev, Jordan, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha & Esa Itkonen (eds.). (2008). The shared mind. Perspectives on intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: Benjamins [Converging evidence in language and communication research 12].