Perspective Shift Across Modalities

Languages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms indexical shift: A quotation like “Selena ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves because the first-person ‘I’ refers Selena, not actual speaker. We then discuss variety noncanonical modality-specific devices: role sign language, quotatives spoken free indirect discourse written point-of-view visual language. show that these devices permit complex mixed forms which may involve nonlinguistic gestural as well components.