4 - Identifying Cognitive Orientation

Summary

Chapter 4 is the first of four chapters that each explore conceptual aspects that are of potential interest to researchers when using language to access cognition, across a broad range of subject areas. These conceptual aspects can therefore be regarded as prominent analysis perspectives. This chapter starts by discussing two central phenomena related to cognitive orientation: attention and perspective. Both of these are systematically reflected in language use, albeit in different ways: attention underlies our choice of what we say, whereas perspective addresses how we say it. What we say will reflect what we attend to; aspects that we barely think about will rarely be reflected in our descriptions. As we formulate what we’re attending to, we can use our own point of view or adopt a different one, such as our interaction partner’s standpoint. While we don𣀙t often say explicitly which perspective we’re using, our language will reflect the underlying viewpoint in systematic ways.