Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon University) The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective

Humans demonstrate a remarkable ability to take other people’s perspectives. When we watch movies, we find ourselves identifying with the actors, sensing their joys, hopes, fears, and sorrows. This system of perspective taking relies on neural processes that support body image matching, localization, empathy, and perspective tracking. Together, these mechanisms allow us to use language to update our shared mental models of the world. To do this effectively, language provides a series of cues to facilitate the construction and shifting of perspectives. These cues include a wide variety of constructions from reflexive pronouns and discourse adverbs to relative clause structures. Many of the traditional results of psycholinguistic research, such as the processing of competitive attachments and sentential ambiguities, can be reinterpreted within this new theory of perspective shifting. Within this context, we can see grammar as arising diachronically from the function of tracking perspectives during conversational interactions.