| The term "speaker's perspective" refers to one aspect of subjectivity which influences language in a variety of ways. Subjectivity interacts with morphosyntactic rules and discourse factors to regulate utterance forms. A speaker can express a certain attitude toward information that he is communicating by word selection (e.g., epithets) or selection of grammatical constructions (e.g., adversative passive). A speaker can select a point of view from which he describes certain situations (e.g., 'John hit Bill' vs. 'Bill was hit by John').;Further, a speaker has a way to express his cognitive involvement, which is identified in this dissertation as speaker's perspective. Speaker's perspective in Japanese is most clearly seen in predicates which represent the internal states of persons, since the speaker has different degrees of accessibility to these mental states. Thus the predicate form in Japanese for 'I am sad' is different from 'He is sad.' A speaker has "primary perspective" when he talks about his own internal state. He has "secondary perspective" when he talks about someone else's internal state.;This well-known fact about Japanese internal predicate forms is also responsible for tense form variation in spoken narrative discourse. The tense form of a clause is past when the speaker has primary perspective, i.e., when he is an actor of some action or an experiencer in some situation. Otherwise the tense form is non-past, despite the fact that the situation existed in the past.;Two non-finite verb forms, TE and TARA, mark continuous and discontinuous perspective, respectively, across clauses as switch reference markers. When primary perspective continues to be the perspective of the next clause, TE connects the two clauses. When the perspective shifts from primary to secondary, TARA marks this shift. When there is a shift from secondary to primary, the two clauses are not connected by these verb forms, but are separated by a finite form.;Though the focus in this dissertation is the effect of speaker's perspective in Japanese, it is suggested that this concept also operates in other languages. |
