Four kinds of subjectivity: from speaking to communicating

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to argue for the utility of subjectivity as a descriptive notion and to support this aim by distinguishing between different levels of linguistic analysis where subjectivity plays a role. The idea behind this is to develop and promote the use of the notion of subjectivity in the framework of descriptive linguistics and cross-linguistic comparison. Subjectivity is conceptualized as the speaker’s expression of “self” and the paper identifies four kinds of subjectivity: Subjectivity of speaking – the speaker’s choice to say one thing instead of another; Subjectivity of reference – how speaking subjects position themselves with respect to objects, places, times, and other speaking subjects; Subjectivity of stance – how speaking subjects position their attitudes to knowledge of the world with respect to the knowledge-states of other speaking subjects; Subjectivity of communication - how speaking subjects position their utterances with respect to the potential and actual utterances of other speaking subjects. On the communicative level, subjectivity is argued to be a useful notion in the definition of grammatical forms that primarily serve communicative, rather than referential functions. On this level, the speaker’s responsibility for an utterance constitutes a subjective orientation that may be contrasted with a non-subjective, public orientation where the speaker shares responsibility with a larger group.