Point of View and Grammar: Structural Patterns of Subjectivity in American English Conversation (review)

Joanne Scheibman’s book belongs to a series dedicated to research on the grammar of discourse. The volume is an empirical study of language in use (eighty minutes of recorded and carefully transcribed conversations in American English) conducted with two basic premises in mind, namely that (i) language is a tool subjectively used by speakers to express their viewpoints, and that (ii) the viewpoints emerge from the repetition of lexical and grammatical resources available.

Ch. 1 offers a survey of previous research on language in use, especially on the notion of subjectivity and the relationship between grammar and conversational discourse. Ch. 2 presents the data under scrutiny, special attention being paid to the methods of coding and transcribing the structural, functional, and semantic properties of the conversations. To an extent, the chapter is also an analytical one: the coding procedures, which serve the need of transcribing pieces of actual discourse, allow one to verify the validity of linguistic categories established on the basis of theoretical divagations.

The analysis proper, however, is presented in Chs. 3 and 4. Ch. 3 focuses on the combinations of different types of subject (first, second, and third person singular; first and third person plural; human/nonhuman; specific/generic), verb type (verbs of cognition, verbs of perception, verbs of verbal process, material verbs), and tense. It is observed that when describing events and participants in these events, speakers assume certain viewpoints, which influences the structure of the conversation in which the speakers engage. Ch. 4, in turn, examines what seems to be the most frequent utterance type in conversational discourse, clauses expressing relational processes (represented, following M. A. K. Halliday, by the formulae ‘x is a’, ‘ x is at/in/on/about etc. a’, or ‘x has a’). It is found that, unlike lexical verb types (cf. Ch. 3), relational predicates typically occur with subjects having nonhuman referents, usually it or that. This fact is taken as an indication that the speaker’s point of view is conveyed by expressing a relationship between the subject and the predicate, rather than between the speaker him- or herself and some other entity. Ch. 5 summarizes the study, recapitulates its major observations, and offers some insight as to the future research on language structure in general and linguistic subjectivity in particular.

The volume is a very detailed and careful study of conversational discourse and the methods employed therein to convey speaker stance. The most important conclusion seems to be that, contrary to referentially based linguistic analyses in which lexis and grammar are viewed as describing events in an ‘objective’ manner, recurring lexical and grammatical patterns are tools used to convey the viewpoint of the speaker, his or her perceptions, feelings, or opinions.