Construal and Perspectivization

A fundamental principle in Cognitive Linguistics is that semantics is, indeed, primarily cognitive and not a matter of relationships between language and the world (or truth conditions with respect to a model). This principle becomes especially manifest in the research into facets of meaning and grammatical organization which crucially makes use of notions such as ‘perspective’, ‘subjectivity’, or ‘point of view’. What these notions have in common is that they capture aspects of conceptualization that cannot be sufficiently analyzed in terms of properties of the object of conceptualization, but, in one way or another, necessarily involve a subject of conceptualization. A strong incentive for this type of research stems from the awareness that the more linguistic problems can be solved by making use of these notions, the more (heuristically) successful the fundamental principle is; in addition, this research is motivated by the awareness that the best way to make these notions relevant for linguistic analysis is not given a priori and thus requires empirical investigation. It is therefore not surprising that there is in fact quite a large body of research into such nonobjective facets of linguistic meaning. The cover term that has come to be used for different ways of viewing a particular situation is ‘construal’. At a very elementary level, construal is a feature of the meaning of all linguistic expressions, if only as a consequence of the fact that languages provide various ways for categorizing situations, their participants and features, and the relations between them. Speaking thus always implies a choice: