Introduction: viewpoint and perspective in language and gesture, from the Ground down

In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The anecdote of the jar”, the narrator has put a jar on a Tennessee hilltop, with apparently dramatic results. The jar, we are told, took dominion everywhere, imposed order on the slovenly wilderness, and forced the wilderness to surround the hill on which it sat. Before the jar, it seems there were no human objects in the wilderness. And natural features like hills and valleys have no inherent preexisting relation between landmarks and “surroundings”, since the relation between figure and ground is an aspect of a viewer’s perceptual construal, rather than of the perceived objects.† The jar – a human artifact and a durable reminder of the human presence of the narrator – has proliferated new human-centered construal of space. It has made the land into a landscape. A stretch of country with a human in it is no longer just a stretch of country – it is also a human’s egocentric conceptualization of that physical area. Viewpoint permeates human cognition and communication – predictably, since we never have experience of the world except as a viewpoint-equipped, embodied self among other viewpointed, embodied selves. Language reflects this fact of embodiment: linguistic structure shows no way entirely out of viewpoint to an objective pre-experiential description of the world. But it also shows in complicated and fascinating ways the possibility of a single mind accessing multiple different viewpoint affordances on the same scene. Without such cognitive flexibility, humans could not cooperate and communicate at the high level that is apparently unique to our species, and universal to neurally and developmentally typical members of the species (Tomasello 1999, 2008). For this reason, viewpoint is a phenomenon of special interest to almost anyone studying cognition or communication: linguists, cognitive scientists, literary analysts, philosophers, and many more. The title phrase in this introduction, from the Ground down, articulates something that the rest of this book confirms: cognitive perspective starts with bodily viewpoint within a real physical Ground of experience. In a mental space